Juno News - October 01, 2021Trudeau's reconciliation holiday is symbolism without action
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Summary
Coming up, Canada has its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, but the government is so hung up on symbols, it's not offering any substance. The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now, and it's the last episode before the long weekend.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, Canada has its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation,
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but the government is so hung up on symbols, it's not offering any substance.
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Hello and welcome to another edition, the last before the weekend of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show,
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Hope you're having an absolutely wonderful start of the beginning of the weekend or start of the end of the week.
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But regardless, thanks very much for tuning in.
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I don't know how many of you this week got to experience this new holiday that the federal government declared.
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The day is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, observed by the federal government,
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by federally regulated sectors like radio stations, banks, post offices, that sort of thing.
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Not by a number of provinces, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
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But basically, this was a day that was intended to turn the page on Canada's relationship with Indigenous people.
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Having a national holiday was one of the recommendations put forward in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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It's a relatively easy one to implement, but I think it only really had political capital for Justin Trudeau
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after the announcements by a number of Indigenous communities of unmarked graves,
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starting into Kamloops and then Cowessess and several others as well.
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And one thing that is noteworthy here is that I've got no issue with having a stat holiday.
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The problem that I have with holidays in general, however,
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is that they tend to obscure what is actually supposed to be recognized and respected.
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One of the most notable examples of this is Memorial Day in the United States.
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This is a day that's supposed to serve to honor fallen soldiers,
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but it just becomes this big, giant barbecue confab.
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And in Canada, we see Family Day, which, again, was implemented not for any specific solemn occasion,
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but just to make people spend time with their family, but it just becomes a general day.
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How many people view Labor Day as an excuse to talk about the contributions of labor and workers' rights?
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No. Unions send out a press release, but everyone just views it as a day off,
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the last long weekend at the cottage, and so on.
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Now, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation this year has a lot of momentum.
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There's a lot of interest in the media and politics to talk about the intent behind the day,
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which is to commemorate those lost to Canada's mistreatment of Indigenous peoples throughout history.
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But the reality is that meaning will get more and more muddled and muddied as time goes on.
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And in a certain number of years, I don't know how long, it will just be a day off for people,
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especially if schools start to give it to students and post-secondary institutions
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and provinces start recognizing it, which has been a bit of a mixed bag so far,
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much to the chagrin of many Indigenous leaders.
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So, again, I mean, there's nothing wrong with it.
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I'm not against it, but you have to wonder what is it actually doing?
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And that's a question that can be asked about a lot of the things that Justin Trudeau has done
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Jody Wilson-Raybould, the Indigenous woman who formerly was his Attorney General
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before she was summarily fired for not wanting to break the law on behalf of the government,
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she said that, yeah, symbolism's fine, but substantive action needs to follow it.
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Justin Trudeau will get up there and virtue signal all day long about any number of things,
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But when push comes to shove, the action isn't there.
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Yet there are still Indigenous communities that don't have drinking water.
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There's still the Indian Act, which is widely regarded as an absolutely abysmal,
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racist, and paternalistic act that no one likes.
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But there's been zero action on dismantling it or reforming it.
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And there are still any number of competing land claims that are still going on.
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So the concrete issues that Indigenous communities are dealing with are still there.
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We get Justin Trudeau two years ago saying that Canada is committing genocide,
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but not really following that with any action to counter this supposed genocide.
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We've got flags going to half-mast for more than four months now.
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And then we've also got the other dimension of this, which is this brand new holiday.
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I want to talk about the flag aspect of this for a moment,
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because this sort of became an issue of interest,
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a little bugaboo of mine during the election campaign.
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You may remember it was actually on the very first day of the election campaign.
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I had asked Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole about this.
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And I said, right now, the flags have been at half-mast for, at the time, three months.
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What would you do as Prime Minister as far as this?
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Would you just keep them at half-mast or would you bring them back up?
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After the terrible situation of the discovery at the former residential school site in Kamloops,
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I offered bipartisan support for the Prime Minister
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to move immediately on Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action 71 to 76
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that deal directly with former residential school sites and missing children.
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We as Canadians owe it to the families and to First Nations to provide a path to healing.
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It's a time to recommit to build it to be the country we know it can be.
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And reconciliation is very important and should be important to all Canadians.
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I think to recommit to Canada, you have to be proud of Canada.
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You can't cancel the one day a year that you commit to your country.
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You need to use that day to recommit to the path of reconciliation.
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So I've been talking to Indigenous leaders since I became opposition leader.
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Reconciliation will be important for me, as will be pride in Canada,
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building it up, making it more opportunity for more people, including Indigenous peoples.
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And I do think we should be proud to put our flag back up.
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Now, as it was happening, I was kind of thinking,
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And that actually became, as I've talked about on the show,
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Aaron O'Toole started to talk about that in his stump speech
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You brought them down in the wake of these announcements of unmarked graves.
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Sure, you want to commemorate the lives of Indigenous children that were lost.
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and he couldn't articulate at what point this period of mourning will end.
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I think it was about a week before the election,
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How long do you plan to keep the flags lowered at half-mast at federal buildings?
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And how will you decide when it's time to raise them?
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I plan to keep those flags at half-mast until it is clear that Indigenous peoples are happy to raise them again.
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I think Canadians have seen with horror those unmarked graves across the country
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So he says their Indigenous leaders are the ones who get to decide.
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and it has to be clear that they want the flag up before the flag is going to go up.
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Is he going to allow one Indigenous leader to make the call?
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And you may say, well, what's the, what, why does the flag matter so much?
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Because I had this question asked of me when I asked Aaron O'Toole about it.
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People saying, well, why does it matter so much?
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This is the whole point I've been making in this show thus far.
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And if it matters so much to have the flag go to half-mast as a symbol,
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then keeping it at half-mast also sends a message that needs to be addressed.
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And the fact that this went on as long as it did,
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without anything concrete from Justin Trudeau about at what point it goes up,
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at what point we can claim mission accomplished,
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the longer it goes, the harder it becomes to do it.
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Because now, whenever that moment comes, when Justin Trudeau says,
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He's confronted with this obvious question of, well, what's changed?
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Why does Canada now deserve to graduate from this perpetual state of mourning,
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which is really what a flag being at half-mast is meant to symbolize?
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And just as a matter of practicality, because the flag was kept at half-mast,
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including on Canada Day, which is particularly egregious,
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all of these days between then and now, between that day in May and now,
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when the flag would have gone to half-mast for something else,
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So by keeping it at half-mast, it very much becomes meaningless.
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Because now you look up, I mean, this used to be the thing,
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whenever you drive around, you'd look and you'd see a flag,
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And I would always go and look, because the government maintains,
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and you can see it here, this flag protocol website.
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And look closely, they still have on it all of these other things
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because it's been there in a standing way, in perpetuity,
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And incidentally, some Indigenous leaders have made this point.
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Marie Wilson, who is one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission commissioners,
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says that this has become a politicized debate.
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And she said the whole point is that people stop noticing.
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She says if you stop noticing, it loses its value.
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And also, you can't mark other occasions when the flags are already lowered.
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She says, does that make these things less of a moment,
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Lowering flags did not appear anywhere in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.
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that the government still hasn't managed to find solutions to.
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Like, for example, ensuring safe and adequate supply of drinking water
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And I'm not here because I have the silver bullet,
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the answer that's going to solve all of these problems,
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but I can certainly point to the fact that focusing solely on the symbols,
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It's the government that's supposed to be coming up with these things.
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And this was my frustration when Justin Trudeau accused Canada of committing genocide.
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The background on this is that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report
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had made this charge, that Canada had engaged in genocide
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And Justin Trudeau accepted that the day after.
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So he says that he's overseeing a government that has partaken or is partaking in genocide.
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And you'd think that would invite something like,
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oh, I don't know, calling the International Criminal Court to step in
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It was never meant to be something he believed,
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And that was why when I had the opportunity to put a question to him
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after the French language leaders debate during the election,
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Prime Minister, in 2019, you accepted the assertion
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of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report
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More than two years later, do you believe that Canada is still engaging in genocide?
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to grieve with them over the unmarked graves of the children
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and ripped away from their families over the past many, many generations and decades,
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we also took a very concrete step forward on removing kids at risk
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and keeping them in their communities, in their language.
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And it is concrete steps like that, that actually doesn't just grieve over the terrible tragedies
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of the past, but takes steps to correct and move forward that makes all the difference.
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He didn't answer the point of whether Canada is still engaged in genocide.
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He said there was a turning point when he decided to transfer some provincial welfare
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responsibilities in Saskatchewan to the Indigenous communities,
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which is certainly a step in the right direction.
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But if that's all it takes to end genocide, my goodness, Slobodan Milosevic,
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he could have made all his problems go away if he had just made a little child welfare adjustment
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So the reality here is that we have a government that is insisting on virtue signaling
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And because they are focusing on symbols only, we are forced to combat those symbols.
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Yeah, if you're going to do the symbolism, that's fine, but follow it with substantive action.
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And one point, and Aaron O'Toole, I think, said this very well.
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If you want to fix your country, you have to have a baseline pride in your country.
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You have to think your country is worth fixing.
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And when you have a flag at half-mast for months on end,
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including on the country's birthday, this would be unheard of in any other country,
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to be in mourning about your country on the day when you're supposed to celebrate your country.
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This is just not something that would happen in a real country.
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So what is going to occur here is that Canadians are going to have to grapple with this fact
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that the government is telling them, you know what, your country's, who cares,
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Look, it's just this permanent act of penance, this perpetual self-flagellation on a national scale
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And that's the concern about this holiday, is that it isn't focused on solutions.
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It's just focused on inducing a national guilt trip.
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And you may say, well, the national guilt trip is deserved.
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And yes, there's an argument, and this was the basis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report,
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that to move forward, you have to address and remedy the wrongs of the past.
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But is any of this package of stuff that Justin Trudeau is offering achieving that?
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And just as an interesting point here, if I may, if you'll indulge me,
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Tristan Hopper in the National Post had pointed this out.
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He said, the agencies that perpetuated the residential schools program are the agencies that are getting the holiday.
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It was the federal government that was to blame.
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An indigenous person who works at, oh, I don't know, Walmart or something is not getting the holiday.
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An indigenous person who doesn't work for the federal government or in a federally regulated space isn't getting the day off.
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The architects of all of these problems are the ones being rewarded here.
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And I thought that was just an interesting point.
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And it came from a letter to the editor in the Chilliwack Progress,
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pointing out the irony that a holiday will be disproportionately marked by employees of the same federal agencies
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that were responsible for the Indian residential school system.
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So I found that to be a valuable thing to note here, that the ones who are telling us they're, you know,
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putting this front and center are really just getting a day off in the final days of summer here.
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Well, I guess we're now into the fall, but the remainder of the point still stands.
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So as much as substance matters more than symbols,
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this isn't to say symbols don't matter when the government itself is putting so much stock in them.
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And more than an orange shirt, more than a day off, more than any of these other things,
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even more than the term genocide when it's not accompanied by action,
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the idea of the Canadian flag being at half-mast is more important than the flag itself.
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I don't care about flags because they're pieces of fabric.
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I care about a flag because a flag represents the country.
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And the government giving this standing order for months on end to keep flags at half-mast
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is the government saying that the country is not worth defending?
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I mean, how are you supposed to wear a Canadian flag overseas
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if you're one of the members of the Canadian Armed Forces Deployed,
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if your government is saying that flag is something to be ashamed of?
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How are you supposed to work to find a solution within Canada
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when the government is telling you that Canada is the problem, that Canada is evil?
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Which is the implication of saying that we need to keep the flag at half-mast
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And Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of Canada, shared a message.
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I join with all Canadians on this first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
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to reflect on the painful history that Indigenous peoples endured
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and on the work that remains to heal and to continue to build an inclusive society, unquote.
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So you've got the Crown doing what all of the advocates for justice on this file have pushed for,
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which is recognizing that harm took place, recognizing the wrongs,
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The Crown, it doesn't get more high profile than that as far as proclamations in Canada.
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The Queen doesn't issue proclamations on Labor Day.
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The Queen doesn't issue proclamations on Civic Holiday.
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The Queen is issuing a proclamation on this day.
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And of course, they're words, but they're words that carry some weight because recognition
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has been heralded as the stepping stone to progress, as the stepping stone to reconciliation.
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So let's have a clear roadmap and let's follow it, but let's deal with the things that matter.
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I don't like that I have to spend months saying when are the flags going to go up,
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when are the flags going up, but that is a necessary response
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when they are at half-mast in the way that they are.
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We'll be back with a full-strength edition of the program on Tuesday.
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Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.