Conrad Black: Canada Needs to End Its Self-Flagellation and Focus on Building a Prosperous Future

A statue of founding Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Commentary

The anniversary of Canadian Confederation is traditionally a time to wallow in orotund platitudes about our good fortune to have this country, and the admirable qualities of all those who discovered it, settled it, and built it. This custom has perhaps been tempered slightly by the heckling of dissenters and particularly lamentations, some of them sincere and justified and some false and defamatory, over the historic treatment of indigenous peoples. My intuition is that the Canadian tendency to emulate popular cultural trends in the United States is part of the source of the current widespread national self-criticism over treatment of the indigenous.

The United States, after the evil institution of slavery—what Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil”—followed by a century of official hypocrisy and racial discrimination sheltering behind the apparently neutral word “segregation,” has made the greatest effort of any society in history to raise up a formerly forcibly servile racial minority to a position of equality with the descendants of its former owners. As the ability of African Americans to make morally unanswerable criticisms of U.S. society has practically expired with the hard work of African Americans themselves and the generous course-correction of the white majority in America, the diehards—the sincere bearers of ancient grievances and the charlatans and hypocrites who promote racial strife—raised one more scorpion’s tail of racial hostility and imperishable grievance. It is fading now as violent crime rates in the United States sharply diminish and the deliberate or negligent admission of hundreds of thousands of dangerous violent illegal migrants has ceased.

But as it arose again in the last decade, and Canada thrashed about in its long-standing and largely subconscious impulse to keep pace with the Americans, we could not rebuke ourselves for slavery. Modern slavery—the shackling of people of tropical origin to do tropical physical work for which they have a greater aptitude than white people, such as harvesting cotton and tobacco—provided the economic rationale for slavery that never existed in Canada.

There were only approximately 60 slaves in New France, and they had the ability to work their way out of slavery. That system of slavery was abolished when what is now Quebec passed from the French to the British Crown. Slavery was outlawed in what became Ontario when the jurisdiction was founded in 1791, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1832, 35 years before Canada became a self-governing country. The only slavery that ever flourished in Canada was the enslavement of indigenous people by other indigenous people.

As we were unable to flagellate ourselves on the slavery charge (despite the efforts of former Chief Justice Beverley MacLachlin and others to do so), we were much too submissive to the blood libels of various forms of attempted genocide hurled at us by our native victimhood industry. The nadir of this self-abasement came with the lowering of all official Canadian flags for six months in mortified humility and shame over the apparent discovery of 215 corpses of indigenous children in unmarked graves in British Columbia after they supposedly died as a result of the negligence, if not the brutality, of Indian Residential Schools. To the best of our knowledge, after many millions of dollars of government research, no such deaths occurred.

What has been most unjust in this process is the appalling desecration and denigration of the principal founder of our country, John A. Macdonald. Even in the times of Lincoln, Palmerston, Disraeli, and Gladstone, he was a great statesman and was recognized to be so by all of those men and many others. Macdonald gave the natives the right to vote and ensured that they had land, and settlers were required not to enter the native domains that were sufficient to provide them with food. The residential schools themselves were a response to the requirement that all children in Canada receive a basic education. These were progressive and not repressive measures, though their administration was undoubtedly uneven.

In fact, the native civilization discovered in Canada by the early explorers did not have a written language and had not discovered the wheel. The natives were extremely capable but they had a Stone Age civilization, and the Europeans permitted them to advance 5,000 years in a short time, albeit in a process that was very imperfect, but rarely malignly intended. There were only approximately 200,000 indigenous people in Canada and over 90 percent of them were nomadic, so all these mournful confessions that we have to endure at public occasions that we are trespassing on the land of native tribes is essentially bunk.

In this week of traditional celebration of Canada, let us reflect on the fact that we have the only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary Confederation in the history of the world, that we have two of the most distinguished official cultures in the world, we have a highly educated and generally law-abiding population, and a vast and magnificent country that is a treasure house of almost every resource. Of all countries with 20 million people or more, our political institutions are the oldest except for the United Kingdom and the United States, and in that time, the British lost the major province of Ireland, and just before Canada was launched as an independent country, the United States had just finished its terrible Civil War in which 750,000 people died in a population of 31 million.

We had to gain our independence from the British peacefully because we needed them to protect us from the Americans. And until the last 10 years, we have kept pace with the growth in population and prosperity of the United States, which in only two long lifetimes transported a few million colonists and their slaves to a level of power and influence in the world with no precedent since the height of the Roman Empire, if then. Our achievement is parallel to theirs, and less tumultuous. We are a peaceable country, among ourselves and in the world, and have only gone to war for just and victorious causes and our armed forces have thoroughly distinguished themselves.

These are all facts to be proud of and they should inspire us to resume our pattern of competitive economic success that has eluded us in the last 10 years. Our past is admirable, and we can make our future a brilliant one.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.