Former PM Jean Chrétien stares down the woke mob
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Summary
Former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien goes against the woke mob when it comes to reconciliation, but because he's a liberal, he lives to tell about it. In this episode, Candice takes a deep dive on the comments that former PM Jean Chretien made on residential schools, and why he's coming under fire.
Transcript
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Former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien goes against the woke mob when it comes to reconciliation,
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but because he's a liberal, he lives to tell about it.
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I'm Candice Malcolm and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.
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Today I want to do a bit of a deep dive on former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
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and the comments that he made on residential schools, how he's coming under fire.
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But first, if you enjoy the Candice Malcolm Show, if you like what we do here at True North,
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So I want to talk a little bit today about Jean Chrétien, who was the Liberal Prime Minister.
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He was the Prime Minister from November 1993 all the way until December 2003,
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over 10 years in office. And before that, he was a high-ranked minister in the government
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of Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau's father. So he is an old-school liberal.
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He is 87 years old right now, the oldest living Canadian Prime Minister.
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And so Chrétien has a new book out, My Stories, My Time, Volume 2.
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So this is the follow-up to his first memoir and he's out doing the rounds promoting it.
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So on Sunday evening, he was on two major networks doing an interview.
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So his English interview was over on CTV on the show Question Period with Evan Solomon
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and his French interview was on Radio Canada, the very, very popular talk show called
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Tout Le Monde and Pearl. And he made some comments. Basically, his comments can be split into two
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and I'm going to go through both of them right now. The first one was a critique of the Justin Trudeau
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government and the way that Trudeau is running things from everything from foreign policy
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to his spending, to his deficits, to his printing of money, which is pretty remarkable in and of itself.
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Given that we have a sort of storied, very successful, very revered liberal prime minister
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critiquing very openly the current liberal prime minister, saying that Trudeau doesn't listen
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to people like him and unleashing a pretty, pretty serious criticism.
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And the second thing, the one that the media is really, really picking up on is that Chrétien
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spoke his mind when it came to residential schools. He said some things that would have not been
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controversial a couple of years ago. He said some things that most Canadians probably on some level
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agree with. However, it goes against the media narrative that the media has spent the last six
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months building up, building up this hatred of Canada, this, this idea that Canada is uniquely evil,
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that we committed genocide, that everything that we did in the past was just purely evil. And even the
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intentions behind it were evil. And you can't, there's, there's no defending it whatsoever.
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Chrétien, it's like he, it's like, he didn't get that memo. It's like, he didn't pay attention to the
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media and their made up narrative. They're over the top rhetoric. They're, you know, trying so hard
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to be woke. And he, and he just said what he believes. And, and so it's pretty remarkable just
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in, in, in that, in that we, here we have a liberal leader who is not cowering to the woke mob,
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not cowering to the legacy media and their made up narrative. He's just speaking what he believes
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is the truth and what happened. And so we're going to go through his comments right now.
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So first, when he was on Tutte Le Monde, he was asked about the residential schools. He was asked
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why he didn't act sooner to dismantle them, even though the last one did close on his watch. So
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they did close under his leadership as prime minister, but not soon enough. You know, they,
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they remained open for decades while Chrétien was running the ship, both as the minister of Indian
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affairs and then later as prime minister. And Chrétien said this, he said, no one ever mentioned
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this problem when I was minister, never. And so, you know, the media being the media run out and tried
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to dispute this comment, try to fact check it, try to find examples of the, in the public record of
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people raising this concern to him. I believe Chrétien, he said that it wasn't brought to his
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attention. It was clearly not a major issue at the time. Maybe someone wrote a letter, but that
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doesn't mean that the minister read it. The minister is dealing with, you know, hundreds and
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hundreds of things every day. And just the fact that someone wrote a letter doesn't mean that he
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actually read it. Then Chrétien goes on to compare the ill treatment of children at residential schools
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to the experience of boarding schools at the time. And of course the media is, is, is like taking this
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out of proportion again, saying how, how, how dare he compare his own experiences at boarding school
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to the horrors of residential school. I just want to pause for a second and say that the idea that
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there were abuses that took place at residential schools, that is obviously true, that that's been
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documented, but to take a step back as Chrétien is doing, it's like, you know, this is a different
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time. There were different norms. There were different standards. The whole idea that there were
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abuses by the Catholic church. We all know those abuses were widespread. They happened wherever there's a
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Catholic church all over the world. So the idea that someone could only have a bad experience at a
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residential school and it was much, much different than someone who could have also been abused in
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a Catholic school situation in a different boarding school is kind of silly. But again, the media being
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the media try to, you know, make, make it seem like it's an outrageous story. So they have this quote from
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Chrétien. He was speaking in French. So this is the translation, but he said, I ate baked beans and oatmeal
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and to be sure it was hard living in a boarding school, extremely hard here in Quebec. We had to, in order to
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get into university. In Shewinigan, we didn't have a college. I had to go to Travier or Joulette. He
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explained, I had new choice, but it was hard. My parents insisted I go to university and I had to
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do it. He went on to say, we can't rewrite history. Terrible things happened. I even adopted an
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Indigenous son to lead by example. This proves my investment in the issue. So again, Chrétien has,
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has a pretty good record when it comes to his life and, and his commitment to this issue, but the media
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trying to make it seem like it is extremely different to go to boarding school versus going
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to a residential school. Look, I have a friend who went to boarding school and while he was in
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boarding school in high school, his roommate committed suicide. His roommate committed suicide
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and he was the one that found his roommate. So, so this idea that residential schools were so uniquely
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different and more awful than regular boarding schools. It's like, look, there are terrible things
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that happen in this world. There are terrible things that happen in all sorts of situations.
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Boarding schools, much like residential schools, can be incredibly lonely places. And so again,
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this idea that you can't compare a bad experience that someone had at a boarding school to the bad
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experiences at residential schools is just not true. Like there are bad experiences that people have
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in, in many different scenarios. And so we should fully reject this idea that the media have created,
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but again, the media have created this scenario where you can't compare that, that comparing is just sort
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of whataboutism. And it diminishes the experiences of First Nations, even though again, lots of people
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had bad experiences growing up. Next, as I mentioned, Chrétien was also over on CTV on the show Question
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Period with Evan Solomon. I want to play you a clip of Evan and Jean Chrétien just to show you the part,
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again, where they're talking about residential schools. The things that Jean Chrétien says are obvious to him.
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They probably would have been obvious and common sense to many, many Canadians, not too long ago,
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before this media narrative came up that Canada has committed all kinds of terrible, unspeakable
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crimes and that every aspect of residential schools is equated to genocide. So here, I'll break it into
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two. This is the first question that Evan Solomon asked Jean Chrétien about whether or not he regrets
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not shutting down the residential school system sooner. Mr. Chrétien, we are living through a time of
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reconciliation. You are the former Minister of Indian Affairs. You talk about it, obviously, in your book.
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Now, there's the recovery of the unmarked graves at the residential institutions, as you know.
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I know that you were involved in the white people. This is a big part of your life.
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A lot of folks say you and Pierre Trudeau should have shut down the residential school system then.
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Instead, what's your view of it now? Do you take any responsibility for that?
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They were there since a long time. And, you know, the last one was close by me when I was Prime Minister.
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We had to manage the problem at that time. You know, education was a very important thing for Natives.
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When I became the minister, there was only a dozen, I think, Indian people graduating from university.
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Thousands and thousands are graduating every year now. Education is the key. And in those days,
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in the isolated area, that was the system they had.
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But they don't regard that as education. They regard it as cultural genocide.
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No, no. But, you know, I'm telling you what is the situation.
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So, again, just amazing stuff here. Because in that clip, what you saw Jean Chrétien do was defend residential schools.
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Like, today, the divide that basically happens is if you're on the woke-left mob,
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you think that Canada is a terrible, awful country that committed genocide.
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Every terrible accusation against Canada is true. Every historical leader must be cancelled and erased
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because they were people who oversaw this genocidal system.
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And the pushback to that is people more on the right or centrists or just sort of the people who reject the woke mob
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who say, look, the residential school system was bad. We're not defending it.
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However, Canada didn't commit genocide. You know, the intent wasn't there to actually kill an entire race of people.
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Whereas what Jean Chrétien is saying is he's going one step further and he's basically defending the idea of these residential schools.
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He's saying that the point was education. Education is so important.
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And he even touts the success of these residential schools in ensuring that many, many more First Nations people go to university than they did.
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So this is truly amazing, incredible stuff. Not even a conservative politician today would come out and defend residential schools in this way.
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You would never hear something like this from Erin O'Toole or any of the other conservative leaders in this country.
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So here we have a former Liberal Prime Minister going much further.
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So then you have Evan Solomon kind of in like a smarmy way jumping in and saying, well, no, they don't regard it as education.
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They regard it as cultural genocide. Well, that's not even the case.
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You know, you have a very loud activist to say it was cultural genocide.
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You have the people who are the ones pushing the woke narrative that say it was cultural genocide.
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But that's not the broad consensus among First Nations.
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So you have Evan Solomon reiterating this woke narrative, reiterating the worst accusations against Canada as if they're facts, as if that's the consensus now.
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And sort of shaming Jean Chrétien for defending his record and defending at least the idea behind residential schools was the education.
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Let's play the rest of this clip where Solomon and Jean Chrétien talk about the legacy of residential schools.
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And we were not in the form of any abuse at that time.
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And for me, you know, I offer with my white paper to abolish the Department of Indian Affairs, to abolish my job.
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And now the people complain we have Indian Act.
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After consultation, when people were arguing that we had an apartheid system,
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having reserved for them an Indian Act and a Department of Indian Affairs and a Minister of Indian Affairs.
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Chrétien brings back his idea of the 1969 White Paper, which this idea was to abolish the entire system,
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the entire two-tiered system of different laws for First Nations people, different rules for First Nations people.
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He wanted to abolish it all and more or less just assimilate the two groups together instead of having a separate law for First Nations,
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You heard him talking about how it was sort of like apartheid.
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Well, remember, he tried to champion this idea, him and Pierre Trudeau.
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But they were shot down by a few very loud, very vocal activists within the First Nations community.
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Probably not the consensus of the First Nations community.
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Probably not the consensus of the entire country.
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But it's pretty remarkable, again, that Jean Chrétien tried to eliminate this entire system and he was shut down.
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Even just the idea of doing that today is so outside of the realm of the sort of things that are okay to talk about,
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And it's kind of a shame because I think that Chrétien and Pierre Trudeau were actually onto something in this idea that we shouldn't have this reserve systems.
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We shouldn't have separate laws and separate rules for First Nations.
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But alas, there goes Jean Chrétien, again, defending something that you would never hear.
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Even a conservative, even a radical, even someone like Maxime Bernier, you wouldn't hear these kind of comments about today.
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So Chrétien does go pretty far outside of the norm of what we're allowed to talk about today.
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And because of it, Jean Chrétien is facing some pushback.
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The woke mob isn't coming for his head in the same way as, again, if a conservative politician had said any of this stuff.
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Former PM Chrétien called out over comments on residential schools.
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This is just kind of silly, but you notice at the top of the story here, it says,
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warning details in this story may be disturbing for some.
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Here it says, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is being called out over his recent comments on residential schools after stating he was not aware of any abuse happening in these institutions while he was Minister of then Indian Affairs.
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Goes on to say Chrétien was Minister of Indian Affairs between 1968 to 1974 under then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
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He went on to become Prime Minister and saw the last operational residential school closed while he was in office.
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In the CTV interview, Chrétien was asked whether he takes some responsibility in light of the continued discoveries of unmarked graves at former residential schools.
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And then it just goes on to quote what he says about education.
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Responding to these assertions on Monday morning, NDP MP and Critic for Indigenous Youth, Charlie Angus,
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cited a handwritten letter he'd read from a teacher to then Minister Chrétien that was from St. Anne's Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario.
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And again, just because someone wrote a letter to the minister doesn't mean that the minister read it.
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So just because they found a letter that was addressed to him doesn't prove anything.
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But again, the media are really digging deep here to try to refute these comments and embarrass Chrétien.
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But again, this is all kind of water off a duck's back for Chrétien.
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The next criticism in the CTV piece, it goes on.
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It says in both interviews, Chrétien also appeared to be comparing his personal experiences to those of Indigenous people.
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In the Radio Canada interview, Chrétien appeared to draw parallels between the experiences of Indigenous children at residential schools
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and those of young people like himself who attended boarding schools, saying life was difficult for all of them.
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I was at boarding school from age six to age 21, Chrétien said.
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The life of a boarding school student, very difficult.
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And then they found someone to refute that again.
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Here is a First Nations person saying, I think Mr. Chrétien, with all due respect, doesn't exactly realize what an Indigenous residential school is.
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It was called a residential school, but it wasn't a school.
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He said that eating certain foods does not compare to the experiences of First Nations children.
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So again, saying that just because you had a bad experience, you cannot compare it to a bad experience of someone else.
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Boarding school, in particular, can be a very, very awful place, like the experience of my friend.
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But again, to the woke mob, you're just not allowed to compare one to another.
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Then the story goes on to talk about the white paper.
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That idea that Jean Chrétien wanted to just abolish the entire system of Indian affairs
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and basically have just one set of laws for all Canadians.
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Which again, I think that there's a lot of validity to that idea.
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And I wish more people would still talk about it today.
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During his tenure as minister, Chrétien proposed a highly controversial and ultimately withdrawn white paper
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that was viewed by Indigenous people as assimilationist, as it proposed, among other things, to eliminate Indian status.
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He said he backed away from that proposal after hearing the concerns from Indigenous groups,
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though he seemed to downplay the concerns over assimilation raised in regards to his white paper proposal.
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You know, it's not the same life that they were living in those early days.
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So again, Gretchen is just sort of downplaying it.
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Just talking about life in a very clear way without worrying about all the loaded terms,
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It's kind of refreshing to just hear a politician say, look, we're French, we were assimilated.
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The First Nations people, you know, they might be assimilated too.
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So if you think this CTV report was bad, I'm going to show you a bit of this CBC report.
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Actually, I'm going to show you the whole CBC report,
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because I want to show you every element of the way that they cover it,
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the way that they frame it, the clips that they choose.
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And you can see how the CBC doesn't even care at this point that Gretchen is a liberal.
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This is one of the most reckless pieces of journalism that you can find out there today,
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This is standard, of course, for the CBC, but it is pretty remarkable that it is a liberal.
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This is how the CBC is framing the entire issue.
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That revelation on the French-language talk show Tout le Mans en Parle sparked backlash.
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I don't know how he could not have heard about the abuse that was going on in residential schools.
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Before he was Prime Minister, Jean Cretchen served as what was then called Indian Affairs Minister,
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During that time, Cretchen claims no one ever told him about the horrors of residential schools.
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Delia Alpikakue says many residential school survivors like her
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weren't ready to share their suffering back then.
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And of course, there was a lot of shame because of the,
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In his interview, Cretchen also drew a comparison
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between his own experience attending boarding school
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to that of Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools.
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This former Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner worries Cretchen's comments
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could encourage others to claim they didn't know.
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He refuses to cower to the media, to the woke mob.
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And he also, in his own book, he chose to write about this.
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That he advised Queen Elizabeth not to apologize to the Maori people in New Zealand.
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Because if she started to apologize to every Indigenous community
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in all of the British Empire, she would end up spending two years in Canada
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on her knees apologizing to all the various chiefs and tribe leaders.
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I think that Canadians should appreciate that Cretchen is saying the things that so
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So I said that Cretchen lives to tell about it.
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Because despite this sort of manufactured media firestorm, a story on CTV, a story on CTV,
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they found, you know, five people to come out and say how horrible Cretchen is for these beliefs.
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And sort of try to open old wounds again and make us feel guilty once again.
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Regardless of that attempt, Cretchen walks away from this looking pretty good.
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He wants people to be interested in what he has to say.
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And I think that he accomplished that at this point in his life.
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He wants Canadians to pay attention to him once more.
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It's really interesting that he also used this as an opportunity to slap down Trudeau,
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to say that he's not really doing a very good job.
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But again, if this was a conservative politician,
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We know that the reaction would have been much, much worse.
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This story has already moved away from the headlines, off social media.
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Everyone's moved on to talk about Trudeau's cabinet shuffle
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and a couple of other things in the news today.
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So this story is sort of no longer a controversy,
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we know that Chrétien would have been treated much, much differently,
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Salkwell Day compared his own experiences being bullied for wearing glasses
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to the negative experiences that some Canadians
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might have experienced with racism when they were growing up.
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And because of that, he was the absolute target of a firestorm
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He lost a position that he had with a law firm as well.
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So he actually did have a financial loss and penalty from comments
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that are actually pretty similar to what Jean Chrétien said.
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He's not apologizing the way that Salkwell Day did,
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which I think is a good tip for people out there.
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You know, if you are the center of a firestorm, don't apologize.
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Just continue, like Chrétien did, to say what you believe,
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And they move along to the next story, which they did to Chrétien.
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I hope that he will inspire more Canadians out there
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push back against this terrible narrative that Canada
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Yes, residential schools, by and large, were terrible.
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But the best thing that we can do, again, is to learn from the past,
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understand the history, realize that it wasn't perfect,
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but that at the end of the day, Canada is a damn good country.
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And we continue to get a lot of things right as we try to improve.
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I hope that people will draw inspiration from Jean Chrétien
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I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.