Will we ever reconcile?

Not as long as there is money to be made on not doing so

On Saturday, September 30^th we expected guests for dinner, so I jumped into the car to pick up some beer to accommodate all potential preferences. When I got there at 11am, the store that was supposed to open at 10am was still closed, with a sign on the door saying that they will only open at 12 to honor the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, our latest federal statutory holiday. This was the first year of its observance, but I did not even know about it until I saw the sign on the door of the liqueur store.

Driving home empty handed, I turned on the radio. I learned about the many events honoring the day where the main attraction was the endless airing of native grievances. The most egregious grievance against the residential schools was that they were ‘forced’ to speak English, but the horrors did not end there. They also had to take baths, and the food was bad. I was so disturbed by hearing this that I had to turn off the radio. I can imagine that they were also forced to use flush toilets and were tortured in school with reading, writing and arithmetic.  

The problem, of course, is that this new holiday has nothing to do with Truth, and even less with reconciliation. It is the Canadian version of Black Lives Matter. What started the latest bout of self-flagellation was a hoax. There were no mass-graves of murdered children, but a lie can go around the world before the truth can put his boots on. Our beloved prime minister, who is ready to apologize for any misdeeds except his own, was quick to do his virtue signaling groveling to the ‘indigenous community’. The hoax truly got around the world, even the Pope issued an official apology in the name of the catholic church. The whole world condemned the Canadian residential school system. Churches were burned down and vandalized. It is labelled a genocide, without any evidence that it ever happened. The supposed mass graves were dug up but not a single bone was found.

Nobody apologized for the hoax and for the burned down churches.
Nobody retracted the articles; nobody was held responsible for the lies.
Nobody seems to be interested in what the truth is. The narrative based on the lie is alive, the truth is ignored. The response is this new statutory holiday and some new taxes, of course.

Just a few weeks ago, a friend sent us this receipt:

…with the following comment:

“Added to the bill you will see is a 1% surcharge "The Land you are on" which is part of a Canadian Gov' initiative which will see 0.8% of GDP directed to the Canadian Indigenous Indians for land rent.”
You can learn more here: Settlers Take Action - On Canada Project

The Canadian government just invented a convenient new virtue signaling tax that will be collected from all Canadians.  

The accusation

We are told that we are bad, because people like us did some bad things in the past and therefore we should feel bad and accept any punishment without questions.
We are proven to be really bad for looking or maybe even thinking like those bad people doing bad things were. Our punishment is that we have to prostrate ourselves, beg for forgiveness for some fuzzy crimes and pay our penalties without questioning where the money goes.

The supposed ‘crime’ is the attempted and forced assimilation of natives into 20^th century reality.
We could argue whether this was the right way to do it, we could discuss how we could have done it better, but these conversations are not happening.

It is not enough to say that ‘mistakes were made’; the only accepted narrative is that crimes were committed. The mass murders are evidenced with imaginary mass graves, and we should never allow the imaginary part to interfere with the good narrative.
The suggestions, and as in this case, some outright accusations are of nefarious intent. Pure malice and racism.

It is not welcome to suggest that it did some good too. That receiving basic education like any other Canadian may have been to the benefit of these children.
It is not OK to point out that many of the leaders of the native-grievance industry came out of the residential school system.
It is not OK to point to these successes of the system and we are expected to believe, that the achievements happened despite the system and not because of it.  
The Indian Residential School system was the Canadian manifestation of Kipling’s idea of The White Man’s Burden.

We can debate the idea, but we cannot possibly even understand it without acknowledging the fact that it was created with the best of intentions and with all the questions and internal conflicts expressed in Kipling’s poem.

The residential school system was created by government orders. By politicians. If they were crimes, they were political crimes, they were the crimes of the state, the crimes of those who govern; but somehow, through the wizardry of transmogrification, these supposed crimes were turned into the crimes of the governed, and their societal attitudes.
Now, these ‘crimes’ need to be adjudicated by the same ‘just and benevolent’ state that committed them in the first place.

The guilt

Let’s suppose that the crimes are as serious as the guilt-mongers claim.
The question is still: what does it have to do with me? I immigrated to Canada more than a decade after residential schools were abolished. Whatever the crimes were, I had nothing to do with them. What does my son, born in Canada, one quarter Japanese, has to do with it?

There are two million Indians (the other kind) living in Canada as immigrants. What do they have to do with the residential school system? Why do they have to pay for the supposed crimes of the white Anglo-Saxons?
Canada’s population in 1969, when the residential school system ended, was 21 million. Today it is 39 million, almost double. In what way are these new Canadians (mostly immigrants) responsible?

Let’s suppose that all these innocent people, who had nothing to do with the crimes accept responsibility and punishment. The question still remains: when will it be enough? How much is enough?

Data gleaned from federal archives and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada shows that spending per registered First Nations person jumped to $9,056 per person by 2012 from $922 in 1950 (the figures are adjusted for inflation so this is an apple-apple comparison). That’s an 882 per cent per capita increase in real terms.

In comparison, all federal program spending on all Canadians (including First Nations ) rose to $7,316 per person in 2012 from $1,504 per capita back in 1950—a 387 per cent increase in real terms.

Federal government spending on natives is not only higher than their equivalent for the general population, but also growing faster. Will it ever end?

The answer to the question in the title of this post is NO. Not as long as there is money to be made on not doing so.

Grievance-mongering is a government racket.
What the government is doing today is even worse than what they were doing with the Indian Residential School system. At that time, there was genuine goodwill and a desire to improve the appalling conditions of Canadian natives.
What we have today, is a cynical exploitation of their plight; an artificial maintenance of simmering conflicts, a deeply corrupt mismanagement of their lives by bribing them to live in the Gulags of reservations without property rights, on perpetual welfare with no easy way out.
And all of it is presented to the rest of us with the sanctimonious, condescending, virtue signaling narcissism of our Prime Minister.

Enshrining this travesty into a national holiday is the clearest proof that it will never go away, that the problems will never be solved, that the truth will never be told and true reconciliation will never happen.

For those of you, who do not know, the selling of alcohol in Canada is a government monopoly.
The unionized work force of the liqueur stores is probably the least diverse work force in the country. It is astonishing to see how white they all are. Now they got another paid holiday, meaning double pay if they work these two hours shorter workdays.

I was standing in front of the store trying to summarize the experience:
Once a year, the palefaces are keeping Tonto away from the fire-water for two hours.

Bravo for Canada.

Links:

Facts about Aboriginal funding in Canada | Fraser Institute
Registered Indian population in Canada by region | Statista
Registered Indian Population by Sex and Residence, 2021 (sac-isc.gc.ca)

Behind the Orange Shirt – The Dorchester Review

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation - Wikipedia

The pope’s apology to Canada’s Indigenous peoples was truly remarkable
New Program Lets Settler Canadians Pay ‘Rent’ to Indigenous Communities (vice.com)

The White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling (poetry.com)