Canada discovers its colonial roots for the very first time

Here's a breaking story at CBC; Saskatchewan First Nation discovers unmarked graves at former residential school.

Senator Murray Sinclair, who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has opined often that with up to 25,000 residential school students unaccounted for, we should expect to find some graves. 

So how is the nation shocked whenever a few more come to light?

There's no sugar-coating it. The settlers came from Europe and stole the entire continent, indeed, the entire hemisphere, from the Indigenous inhabitants.

There will be graves and more graves.

Against this current events background, the Prime Minister of Canada saw fit to lecture China today on the state of human rights there. At least we're acknowledging our past and making things better.

That's true insofar as insincere apologies and empty promises make things better. 

Those human-rights-denying commies in China have pulled several hundred million of their people out of poverty in the last quarter century. 

There are Indigenous communities in Canada that didn't have potable water a quarter century ago and still don't have it today.

How about we stop with the bullshit symbolic gestures and fake moral agony and crocodile tears in front of the TV cameras, and get on with actually delivering the goods.

Working overtime at the Ministry of Condemnation

In the past two weeks Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs has issued seventeen news releases.

Nine of those have been condemnations. To be sure, these are condemnations of events that for the most part ought to be condemned, so perhaps the Ministers in charge should be commended.

But... it's all about the mote in one's own eye.

Outside of a handful of journalists and a few folks like me with too much spare time on their hands, does anyone read the Department of Foreign Affairs website?

Probably not.

What they do read is general news media, where they're far more likely to read stories like this; Canada accused of hiding child abuse evidence.

It's not a happy story. It's about the Canadian government, the same one that finds something to condemn in the world at large every other day, withholding evidence from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that government appointed body that is charged with investigating Canada's abysmal record of genocidal treatment of its aboriginal people.

Indeed, "abysmal" is putting it all too lightly. It was and continues to be an unforgivable disgrace. You might think that Prime Minister Harper's much publicized 2008 apology for residential schools signaled a fresh approach to our relationship with our native population, but you'd be wrong.

It took a court order to get the Harper government to cough up relevant documents to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And were they then turned over?

No.

Instead, the government appealed the court order.

That's something we should all condemn.