Cancel Canada Day?

 

I've been reading headlines that some voices are calling for the cancelling of "Canada Day" in the light of the horrific discoveries of the bodies of children in unmarked mass graves on the grounds of former residential schools. For these people, the racist torture and murder of First Nations children, and the callous dumping of their bodies in pits, ... all done in the name of "civilizing" away from "savagery" and teaching them to adopt Canadian values, ... seems to detract from the celebratory aspects of Canada's founding.

For my part, I haven't been a fan of Canada Day since at least 2013.

Now, remember, the discovery of these mass graves might come as a bit of a shock to some people, but it shouldn't have surprised the government, or the leadership at Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. It certainly isn't a surprise for the First Nations or their allies. (It did come as a surprise to me to hear about it from an ally of the First Nations on the "rabble.ca" discussion board over a decade ago.) 

Think about what that means! The government knew pretty well that these graves were there. They knew about the policy of not informing First Nations parents that their children had died. (Or, if they were informed, they were also told that the government would not pay the expenses of transporting the bodies back to the remote communities from which they'd been stolen from.) But the Canadian state and the various governments in power over the years wanted to pretend that the past hadn't happened. That if First Nations people wanted to expose these crimes they'd have to figure out how to do it. And, only after having forced the First Nations peoples themselves to  pay for the ground penetrating radar specialists and obtain the inconvertible proof of Canada's barbarism and mass murder does the Canadian system acknowledge what it already knew and offer apologies as if these are shocking revelations.

The nauseating hypocrisy!