The Candice Malcolm Show - An honest conversation about Canada’s residential school system

00:00:00.000 Are there things that Canadians believe about residential schools that just aren't true?

00:00:04.780 We would like to have an honest conversation about residential schools,

00:00:08.020 Canadian history, and the best path forward for First Nations people today.

00:00:12.160 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:18.560 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the show.

00:00:21.660 So we all know last year, Canadians were shocked and saddened

00:00:25.500 by the news of the discovery of unmarked graves found near residential schools.

00:00:30.420 Many Canadians accepted this news with grief, remorse, sadness, and sympathy

00:00:35.000 over our history and our past treatment of First Nations people.

00:00:38.920 Some Canadians, however, went even further,

00:00:41.200 and they declared that because of these apparent discoveries,

00:00:44.160 Canada was guilty of some of the worst crimes imaginable.

00:00:47.260 They stated that Canada was irredeemably racist, that we're still racist today,

00:00:50.980 that we're equivalent to the Nazis, and that our country was built on colonialism, genocide,

00:00:56.220 and therefore the whole country was just completely beyond the pale, irredeemably racist.

00:01:02.820 But before we accept these facts, before we accept the very worst accusations leveled against our

00:01:07.700 country, it's important to learn the facts, to consider the context that these policies were

00:01:13.220 implemented in, and to examine our history with a fair and even-handed approach.

00:01:17.660 As journalists, we here at True North, we care primarily about the truth.

00:01:21.800 The truth, regardless of how politically incorrect or socially unfashionable it may be.

00:01:26.860 And because of that, we think it's important to look at our history, yes, with a critical eye,

00:01:30.580 but also with an eye for the truth.

00:01:32.600 So when it comes to the residential school system, we don't believe that it stands up to today's

00:01:38.760 standards, it wouldn't be accepted today, and that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

00:01:42.500 It was a failed policy.

00:01:44.100 It was a centrally planned government-knows-best approach that broke up communities and harmed

00:01:48.300 families, all for the sake of lofty liberal goals.

00:01:51.720 By and large, the program didn't work.

00:01:53.120 It failed.

00:01:53.760 Today, many First Nations still live in poverty.

00:01:55.980 Many of them still have lower living standards and a shorter life expectancy than other Canadians.

00:02:00.440 They have worse health outcomes as well.

00:02:02.620 So in order to address some of these problems today, it's important that we do have that

00:02:06.700 open and honest conversation about our past.

00:02:09.340 I want to examine some of the myths perpetuated about residential schools, discuss some of

00:02:13.020 the ideas and some of the solutions that we can have going forward about how we can move

00:02:16.920 forward together as a country and how we can work to address some of these problems with

00:02:20.560 the discrepancies in living standards for First Nations Canadians.

00:02:23.960 So to do this today, I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Tom Flanagan.

00:02:28.080 Tom is Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.

00:02:32.060 In 2002, he served as campaign manager on Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance leadership campaign

00:02:36.600 and later as campaign manager on Harper's Conservative Party leadership campaign.

00:02:41.220 Tom is an award-winning author.

00:02:42.780 His expertise covers a broad range of issues, including Aboriginal rights, as well as Canadian

00:02:47.780 politics and Canadian history.

00:02:49.140 Now, Tom recently co-wrote a great op-ed here at True North with retired Judge Brian Giesbeck

00:02:55.780 about some of the misleading claims around the residential school narrative.

00:02:59.660 So, Tom, welcome to the Candace Malcolm Show.

00:03:01.360 Welcome to True North.

00:03:02.100 And thank you so much for joining us.

00:03:03.860 Oh, hi, Candace.

00:03:04.700 Great to be here.

00:03:05.340 Well, first, before we get into some of the myths about the residential schools, I want

00:03:10.860 to ask you your opinion and your reaction to that big sort of bombshell news story that

00:03:15.600 we had last year about the discovery, apparent discovery of unmarked graves at residential

00:03:19.880 schools.

00:03:21.500 Well, Candace, this is probably the worst case of fake news that I have ever seen in Canada.

00:03:26.560 To this point, now more than six months after the original announcement, not a single student

00:03:35.260 has been identified.

00:03:37.680 No grave has been identified as belonging to a student.

00:03:40.420 No body has been exhumed.

00:03:42.680 There is actually no evidence at all that these are the graves of students who died at residential

00:03:50.720 school.

00:03:51.600 You have to look at each case, you know, to understand the details.

00:03:54.620 But it started in Kamloops.

00:03:58.540 There was an assistant professor from Simon Fraser with her ground penetrating radar who

00:04:06.020 claimed that there might be 200 plus grave sites in an apple orchard.

00:04:15.380 But in fact, there was always a community Catholic graveyard in Kamloops.

00:04:22.320 It's about a mile away.

00:04:24.620 There's no record of a graveyard near the residential school.

00:04:31.060 And nothing has been produced from this apple orchard, which gives any positive evidence.

00:04:39.100 The other cases that were quickly reported, you know, in succession, there was a kind of

00:04:42.720 series of a series of reports, but they all turned out to also have been community graveyards next

00:04:49.500 to a parish church.

00:04:50.460 And while it's possible that some students from residential schools were buried there, they

00:04:56.080 weren't primarily for that purpose.

00:04:57.540 So there is actually nothing to this story about mass graves or unmarked graves.

00:05:05.000 Until we get some positive evidence, the story should be completely discounted.

00:05:10.940 So it's amazing that it was picked up by opinion leaders and political leaders in the way that it was without any real evidence.

00:05:18.700 Of course, there's people are using, manipulating it, and you're using it for particular political purposes.

00:05:24.460 But I just have to repeat, until we see some positive evidence, this is the worst case of fake news in Canadian history.

00:05:31.080 Well, you know, I watched the case unfold.

00:05:36.080 I followed it very closely.

00:05:37.240 I was one of the reporters that was trying to dig into it.

00:05:39.740 And to me, it was wild because the initial news release that was released by that to Kemloops band basically didn't have any evidence.

00:05:46.620 Like you said, it was very loose on facts.

00:05:48.920 Most of it was just quotes, like community quotes.

00:05:51.540 This is how we're reacting.

00:05:52.860 And it was so interesting, Tom, to see some of the quotes, you know, subjective feelings about what had happened,

00:05:57.980 sort of like rumors and oral history or whatever, being written in as fact in news stories.

00:06:04.020 So there was one sort of famous example where they said, you know, children as young as three are said to have been missing.

00:06:10.520 And then all of a sudden you see the report over in the CBC or in, you know, international publications like the BBC saying,

00:06:17.240 you know, remains of children as young as three were discovered.

00:06:20.000 It's like, well, that's not even what the news release said.

00:06:22.420 The news release was talking about the sort of, you know, the memory of people in the area.

00:06:26.940 And, of course, to your point, you know, one of the stories, one of the other reserves that came forward with similar claims,

00:06:33.860 you know, it turned out that the graveyard where the graves were discovered, this was in Cranbrook,

00:06:37.920 the lower Kootenai Reserve, the, you know, someone else came out and said, you know, this is a known graveyard.

00:06:44.860 It's not, they're not unmarked graves.

00:06:46.480 They're just graves that have fallen into disrepair.

00:06:48.400 I did a bit of research about that graveyard and it predated the residential school by a few decades.

00:06:53.020 And it was actually affiliated with the local hospital.

00:06:55.120 So it had nothing to do with the residential school.

00:06:57.140 It had everything to do with this is where bodies were buried that perished at this local hospital.

00:07:02.540 So I completely echo some of your sentiments there.

00:07:07.440 I want to ask you about some of the reaction because, you know, we saw a lot of sort of grief and, you know,

00:07:13.100 we saw churches being burnt and politicians turn a blind eye.

00:07:16.460 One of the things I was disappointed about with was the response from the Conservative Party.

00:07:21.480 The Conservative Party at that point basically urged the government to fulfill the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Report.

00:07:30.680 The Truth and Reconciliation Report was a radically left-wing initiative and document that completely butchered the facts and ignored the truth.

00:07:37.620 And here we had Conservatives calling for basically more, doubling down on these failed policies of endless spending, more money to unaccountable leaders, doubling down on dependency of this community.

00:07:49.640 Why is it that Conservatives don't really have an alternative position and don't have another approach when it comes to, you know, addressing residential schools, addressing some of the past discrepancies between treatment and helping move this community out of poverty today?

00:08:07.120 Yeah. Well, you know, there's a tendency for a party in opposition to seize anything to attack the government.

00:08:14.740 I mean, it's understandable. They are the opposition. It's their job to oppose.

00:08:18.680 But sometimes parties in opposition will pick up opinions that don't really fit with their own philosophy, but it seems convenient in the short run to use them to try and beat up the government.

00:08:30.660 I think that's what's happened here is the Conservatives in opposition kind of blindly grabbing something without stopping to think about how it would fit into a larger Conservative program.

00:08:44.680 That's too bad. Well, let's move on to talk about your op-ed that you wrote.

00:08:49.260 You wrote an excellent op-ed for True North sort of discussing some of the myths associated with residential schools.

00:08:55.140 One of the major myths that we saw repeated by both sides, I have many libertarian friends, and they say that this was their major issue with residential schools,

00:09:04.580 was that children were forcibly removed from their parents.

00:09:08.840 Your op-ed paints a different picture and says that this isn't true, that the program was never compulsory.

00:09:14.520 So why don't you sort of explain what you wrote in your op-ed and try to address this myth?

00:09:21.360 Yeah, sure. Yeah, a few facts would be useful.

00:09:24.540 We don't maintain that the program was never compulsory, but we point out that it was not nearly as compulsive as is commonly portrayed today.

00:09:33.060 You know, it's become a narrative meme to say that 150,000 children were ripped from the arms of their parents.

00:09:41.800 Well, first of all, at all times, there were more Indian students in day schools than in residential schools.

00:09:52.720 The main option for educating the children of status Indians in this period of time was the day school, which was set up on reserves. 0.70

00:10:02.920 Many of them were run by churches, not all, but many were.

00:10:05.660 But the children lived with their parents or whoever at home.

00:10:09.680 There's also a large number of Indian children who didn't go to school at all.

00:10:15.840 As late as the mid-40s, about 40% of Indian children were not enrolled in any school.

00:10:24.860 The residential school was mainly used, I mean, they were scattered around the country,

00:10:31.660 but they were most heavily used in remote areas of the west and north.

00:10:40.420 So the Prairie Provinces, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Northern Ontario.

00:10:45.260 There was only one residential school in the Maritimes, and there was a handful in Quebec.

00:10:49.860 So residential schools were never the main option.

00:10:56.440 That's an important point to grasp.

00:10:58.620 They were an important option, but they were not the main one.

00:11:01.400 Secondly, there was no real obligation to attend any kind of school for Indian children until 1920.

00:11:14.280 Attendance was put into the Indian Act earlier, but there wasn't any enforcement mechanism,

00:11:21.300 and it wasn't in practice.

00:11:22.740 It was not enforced.

00:11:24.160 And it wasn't enforced that vigorously.

00:11:26.520 Subsequently, as I said, in the mid-40s, there were still a large number of Indian children

00:11:31.740 who were not attending Indian residential schools.

00:11:34.200 There was some compulsion in the later decades, but a lot of it was a substitute for a child welfare system.

00:11:46.460 Life was hard for the First Nations in these years, and many were still supporting themselves

00:11:50.680 by hunting and trapping and fishing, particularly in the north.

00:11:55.120 Mortality rates were high.

00:11:56.420 There were a lot of orphans, and there were a lot of Indian children whose mother had died

00:12:00.860 and whose father had to go out on the trap line, and what was he going to do with the children?

00:12:06.020 So the residential schools became, in their later years, let's say from the 30s and 40s on,

00:12:13.620 probably from the beginning to some degree, but more so as time went on,

00:12:18.280 they became a way of caring for Indian children that didn't have parents who could look after them.

00:12:27.320 So there may have been an element of compulsion there in the Indian agent finding these children

00:12:35.820 and bringing them to the school.

00:12:38.180 But, you know, there's a huge pile of applications for residential school by parents

00:12:44.800 in the Department of Indian Affairs saying, please let our children in.

00:12:49.140 In many cases, the schools were overbooked.

00:12:53.500 They couldn't let in everybody who wanted to come.

00:12:55.620 So I'm not saying there was never any compulsion.

00:12:59.460 There was in some cases, but it was not the dominant feature of the Native history that it is now made out to be.

00:13:08.840 It is one fact among many, but it shouldn't be allowed to dominate our thinking.

00:13:14.820 I'll just add, say in passing, all children are compelled to go to school.

00:13:20.400 Today, provinces have opened up the option of homeschooling where you have to satisfy the authorities

00:13:27.260 that you're doing the equivalent of a school education.

00:13:31.120 But compulsion has been a universal fact of life for parents in Canada,

00:13:37.100 for their children for, you know, for well over 100 years.

00:13:40.680 So the fact that Indian children were required to attend school is hardly surprising. 1.00

00:13:49.460 Well, it's so interesting.

00:13:50.900 I've heard from readers who talk about their own experience,

00:13:53.800 people who say that, you know, they grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan

00:13:58.060 where there was a residential school and a Catholic school, a non-Indigenous Catholic school.

00:14:02.120 And the residential school was way nicer.

00:14:04.460 It had better resources.

00:14:05.740 It had, you know, better teachers and stuff.

00:14:08.140 And you sort of hear anecdotally that life wasn't really that bad.

00:14:12.000 I know in your op-ed you wrote about how one individual who became successful

00:14:16.720 after attending one of these residential schools said that his time there was

00:14:20.600 nine of the best years of my life.

00:14:23.600 So, Tom, help me understand why is it that we have such a negative view of these residential schools 0.59

00:14:29.980 that we see them as genocidal and forced assimilation 0.99

00:14:32.600 and that people have this really like, you know, I've heard Canadians equate them

00:14:37.280 to like Nazi death camps, like with a straight face truly believing that.

00:14:41.780 How did we come to this point as a country where this is the narrative that we have

00:14:44.880 about a program that was, again, based on lofty liberal goals

00:14:48.380 like universal education, lifting people out of poverty,

00:14:51.260 welcoming First Nations people into the broader Canadian community

00:14:53.960 and kind of uniting everybody.

00:14:55.600 And yet today it's really seen in such a negative light.

00:14:58.360 Yeah, well, you know, the historical record is mixed as it is for all human institutions.

00:15:05.600 If I could just draw a comparison for a second, if you look at the literature

00:15:09.360 surrounding boarding schools in England, which were used for the children of elite parents,

00:15:16.080 many students love their schools.

00:15:18.680 Others report, you know, horrifying reports of physical and sexual abuse in these schools.

00:15:24.680 So for residential schools in Canada, you'll find also a mixed set of reports.

00:15:34.620 And there are some like Thompson Highway, the writer that you mentioned, who was very happy there.

00:15:41.240 There are others who have some very dark things to say about residential schools.

00:15:46.780 And I think any honest approach would try and draw the balance.

00:15:50.940 But what has happened is that people with strong ideological convictions,

00:15:57.400 what today is often called wokeism, have taken the bad reports and woven them into their narrative

00:16:04.420 while completely discounting the numerous good reports so that you get a kind of a mythology about residential schools,

00:16:15.880 that they were hell holes and like concentration camps and the children are being murdered.

00:16:20.500 And, you know, there's no end of stories like this, whereas the reality is much more mixed.

00:16:27.240 They were a pragmatic response to the objective difficulties of trying to educate a widely distributed population

00:16:39.580 where the density was enough.

00:16:43.000 Day schools were set up.

00:16:44.400 But in some parts of Canada, I mean, Canada is a big country and transportation is difficult,

00:16:50.020 particularly 100 years ago before modern cars and planes and so on.

00:16:53.840 And if children were going to be in school, in some cases, it had to be a residential school.

00:17:00.500 So it was a pragmatic solution.

00:17:02.240 It had its drawbacks.

00:17:04.220 And we've moved on and we have different solutions now.

00:17:07.740 I'm not even going to say they're better solutions.

00:17:10.200 They're better adapted to the realities of our age.

00:17:13.620 But there's this problem of presentism, of looking at the past as if it were the present.

00:17:20.920 You have to take the past on its own terms.

00:17:24.100 I haven't yet heard anybody say what would have been a practical alternative to residential schools.

00:17:30.320 Would you say no school at all?

00:17:33.580 If we hadn't set up any schools, Canada would be condemned today for leaving this population in ignorance.

00:17:43.620 Day schools were tried and were useful in the majority of cases.

00:17:47.480 But in some cases, the practicalities just weren't there.

00:17:51.580 Public schools, well, many Indians did attend public school.

00:17:56.480 But there were a lot of reports about encountering hostility from the white students and being beaten up by white students.

00:18:06.460 You know, this was a fact of life at the time.

00:18:09.900 Wouldn't happen today in the same way, but it did happen then.

00:18:12.940 And so what was the better alternative to residential schools, given the conditions of the time?

00:18:22.280 Now, maybe Canada should have shut them down sooner.

00:18:25.600 It was realized by about 1950 that they would have to go, and Canada started phasing them out.

00:18:31.380 And they were mostly gone by the 60s and completely gone by 1996.

00:18:38.100 You know, again, maybe it should have happened faster.

00:18:40.900 A lot of things should have happened when we look at the past from the vantage point of the present.

00:18:47.700 No, it's certainly true.

00:18:49.640 Well, I want to sort of move on to the issue today, because it seems like there's still a lot of problems in this community.

00:18:57.120 And we as a country haven't really come up with a lot of good solutions as to how to help address some of these.

00:19:02.360 I know Harper, he did make some strides in trying to make reserves and bans more accountable by making the spending more transparent so that people who live on the reserves could see where the money was going.

00:19:14.200 Of course, Trudeau, one of his first moves in office was to scrap the Accountability Act and allow First Nations to continue to spend without any record of what they're spending the money on.

00:19:24.940 But I'm wondering if you can help me sort of try to understand or come up with some ideas and solutions as to what can be done today.

00:19:32.380 Because the reality, Tom, is that there's still a lot of poverty in First Nations community.

00:19:37.040 There are negative, much worse health outcomes.

00:19:39.820 We were doing some research on this topic and the life expectancy for First Nations men is nine years less than non-First Nations men.

00:19:49.420 And for women, it's 10 years less. 1.00

00:19:50.740 So we have some real, real issues and disparities here.

00:19:55.500 And I'm wondering if you have some ideas and solutions as to how we can we can move past this.

00:20:00.880 Yeah.

00:20:01.360 OK, before I get into that, let me just make one clarification on something you said in the Financial Accountability Act.

00:20:07.940 The Liberals didn't repeal the act.

00:20:11.040 They announced that they would stop enforcing it.

00:20:14.140 So there's no longer financial penalties for First Nations who don't comply.

00:20:18.640 But a large majority of First Nations are complying.

00:20:21.620 Something like 80 percent are still filing their annual financial reports.

00:20:26.120 And that's good news.

00:20:27.320 It would be great if it would be 100 percent.

00:20:29.320 But the fact that it's roughly 80 percent, maybe more the last time I looked, is that's good news. 1.00

00:20:38.360 OK, now what can be done?

00:20:39.920 Well, first of all, we have to get rid of the idea that there is some single government solution to this so-called problem.

00:20:47.600 We have a set of facts and, you know, the facts are that people who are ethnically different, less human capital for a modern society and living in remote places have a much lower standard of living. 1.00

00:21:06.240 I mean, that's a fact that has no single immediate solution.

00:21:11.100 What is happening is that many First Nations are making progress for themselves by playing a role in the modern market economy.

00:21:21.760 And a lot of my research over the last 10 years has been directed towards chronicling that and trying to figure out how they are making progress.

00:21:29.120 And there are now a number of First Nations where the living standard is quite comparable to the Canadian norm.

00:21:38.900 And they've done it on their own by – well, again, there's no single way that they have done it.

00:21:44.700 But the broad picture is through playing a role in Canada's market economy.

00:21:50.540 It could be through casinos in a few cases, recreational industries, hotels, restaurants, fishing lodges.

00:22:03.840 Participation in the resource economy is a big one.

00:22:07.200 What can government do to help this along?

00:22:11.540 Well, the single biggest thing that government could do is to stop impeding the development of resource industries.

00:22:16.600 The large number of the poorest First Nations live in parts of the northern parts of the provinces where not much is happening except resource development.

00:22:34.400 These aren't going to be manufacturing centers or high-tech centers or whatever.

00:22:39.120 These are places where you find oil and gas and hard rock minerals and forestry, in some case fish.

00:22:46.600 And that's how these people are going to be able to progress and make a good living for themselves.

00:22:51.700 And right now, the government seems to be doing all it can to impede development up there.

00:23:00.000 So blocking, for example, of the Northern Gateway Pipeline.

00:23:03.580 There were dozens of First Nations that would have benefited from the Northern Gateway Pipeline.

00:23:09.080 What about the Ring of Fire mining development in Ontario?

00:23:12.820 Again, many First Nations would benefit from that.

00:23:17.020 Will it ever go ahead?

00:23:18.140 Well, I hope so.

00:23:20.420 But, you know, it's certainly not fast.

00:23:23.300 So that's the single biggest thing that governments could do to improve the standard of living for the poorest First Nations is to improve transportation and communication in the northern parts of Canada.

00:23:38.820 So that resource development can proceed.

00:23:41.320 But unfortunately, the government of Canada and, to some extent, other provincial governments are doing exactly the opposite.

00:23:49.900 That's so true.

00:23:51.740 The opposition to some of these natural resource developments, often in the name of First Nations groups, even though those First Nations groups themselves are for the pipelines, is really remarkable.

00:24:02.640 And thank you for the clarification about the Transparency Act there.

00:24:06.420 I was mistaken.

00:24:07.240 I thought Trudeau scrapped it.

00:24:08.400 But I'm glad to hear that I was wrong on that and that it's still on the books and that there are still, you know, 80% compliance rates.

00:24:15.660 That's pretty good.

00:24:16.900 Well, I do have a final question.

00:24:18.740 Recently, Jean Chrétien did an interview where, interestingly, he almost seemed to defend his 1969 white paper proposal.

00:24:26.640 And I know it was really controversial at the time and they ended up walking away from it.

00:24:30.900 But he said that there was still, I don't know his exact quote, Tom, but he said something along the lines how there's still some merit to the idea of basically just, you know, ripping up the treaties and moving away from this whole reserve ban system that we have in Canada.

00:24:45.980 And I was wondering if you could comment on that.

00:24:48.940 And, you know, do you agree with the 1969 white paper?

00:24:52.240 Do you think there's merit there?

00:24:53.060 Do you think that it could still be something that could be proposed today?

00:24:57.560 Do I think it would fly today?

00:24:59.800 No, it didn't fly in 1969 and it certainly wouldn't fly today.

00:25:04.380 Is it a good idea?

00:25:05.880 Well, in an abstract sense, maybe, but it's not politically viable.

00:25:12.940 And I think that's been demonstrated.

00:25:15.720 I have a lot of conservative friends who still are thinking in these terms and they talk about abolishing the Indian Act and repealing all the treaties and everybody's going to be equal. 0.86

00:25:25.060 And so, you know, but that's not the world that we live in.

00:25:28.840 For better or worse, I don't know which it is, but it's a fact that our First Nations have come to be considered as kind of separate entities within Canada.

00:25:41.720 Talking about them as nations is, you know, kind of an exaggeration, but they are definitely separate entities.

00:25:49.440 And they're going to have to find their way to prosper given that.

00:25:55.960 So that's why I've been devoting myself for the last 10 years to trying to figure out how First Nations can prosper.

00:26:04.360 And I don't spend any time on utopian dreams about repealing the Indian Act and unwinding the treaties and all of that.

00:26:15.340 You know, history is what it is and we are where we are and we have to try and make the best of it, is my view.

00:26:23.660 So, you know, as I say, many of my friends still pursue what I think is this utopian libertarian vision of everybody being the same and equal rights for all and none of these legislative differences and so forth.

00:26:43.580 But, you know, maybe there was a moment in 1969 when that could have worked, but, you know, it didn't.

00:26:51.860 Politically, there was just too much opposition to it and it has to be enacted by politicians and they have to take account of, you know, political realities.

00:27:00.840 So, you know, so we are where we are and we have to make the best of it.

00:27:07.060 And I think there are things that will help First Nations to find their way.

00:27:13.580 And partly it's there are some positive things that government can do, but a lot of it is government getting out of the way, you know, not with extreme measures like, you know, repealing the Indian Act.

00:27:26.760 But the Indian Act has been amended repeatedly.

00:27:29.980 You know, it's not the same thing as it was in 1876.

00:27:34.900 You know, people say, well, the legislation's been on the books since 1876.

00:27:40.300 It's obsolete.

00:27:41.100 Well, you know, it's not the same legislation.

00:27:43.400 It's like the criminal code.

00:27:44.520 It's been amended over and over and over.

00:27:47.060 And there's been supplementary legislation that's created new vehicles for First Nations to use for prosperity.

00:27:53.100 The, you know, self-government agreements, the Land Management Act.

00:28:05.080 There's a long list of things that are now possible.

00:28:08.380 So that's what I think, you know, is incremental improvements in legislation have taken place.

00:28:15.780 More are possible.

00:28:17.760 But that's the way to go.

00:28:19.300 Not dreaming of, you know, some kind of big bang in which we get rid of all the debris of the past and start over.

00:28:28.080 You know, that kind of thinking doesn't get you anywhere, in my opinion.

00:28:34.160 So I see a lot of signs for optimism in the progress that First Nations have made for themselves, pessimistic about a lot of current political trends, which I think are doing a lot more harm than good.

00:28:48.380 If I can just mention one, I hope you're covering the recent announcement about the $40 billion settlement of child welfare.

00:29:00.460 You know, this is an unprecedented amount of money.

00:29:04.900 And everybody knew this was coming, that there would be a settlement as a result of the victory in court of the one side.

00:29:14.440 But the amount has suddenly been ratcheted up from somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe $4 or $5 or $6 billion compensation, which is a lot already, up to $20 billion cash payouts with no explanation of why.

00:29:29.860 The only explanation I can see is that Murray Sinclair was invited to the table.

00:29:33.900 And suddenly you get multiplication by a factor of three or four of the cost of this thing.

00:29:40.520 So anyway, there are lots of causes for pessimism as well, but I guess that's kind of typical of human life.

00:29:48.900 Well, Tom, I really appreciate the very nuanced, thoughtful discussion that we've had today.

00:29:53.520 I really enjoyed it.

00:29:54.360 And I just want to thank you for coming on and also for contributing to True North.

00:29:58.440 I heard from a lot of people saying that it was great to see you writing on our site.

00:30:02.420 And I hope you'll continue to do that in the future as well.

00:30:04.540 Well, I'm part of a group of people, a loose network of people that are digging into these issues.

00:30:12.580 So we are planning to produce more fact-based columns like that, which try and set the record straight.

00:30:21.060 So, you know, not immediately, but maybe, you know, in the future we will have more for you.

00:30:27.240 Excellent.

00:30:27.760 Well, we look forward to that.

00:30:29.220 Tom Flanagan, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:30:31.240 Okay, Candice.

00:30:31.940 My pleasure.

00:30:32.360 All right.

00:30:33.760 Thank you so much for tuning in.

00:30:34.940 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - January 19, 2022

An honest conversation about Canada’s residential school system

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