Conrad Black: What Carney should have said about Venezuela

The enfeebling ambiguity of Canada as a government and a state among the nations of the world is underlined almost every week. The prime minister’s statement on the removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was commendably critical of the former president and skirted international law questions in a way that permits Carney to claim to recognize them without aggravating our relations with the Trump administration with whom delicate trade negotiations are underway. All the while, agitation continues in Parliament for the criminalization of those who would justify the native residential school system or minimize the negative consequences of it.

Bill C-413 in 2024 and Bill C-254 last year regard any downplaying or justification of the Indian residential school system as a criminal promotion of hatred. What are proposed are amendments to the Criminal Code modelled upon existing laws against a denial of the Holocaust in which six million Jews and six million non-Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camps of Central Europe in the 1940’s. It is explicitly stated that the residential schools were genocidally inspired and this was confirmed in a 2022 motion in Parliament.

Obviously, all of this is nonsense. The residential schools were set up as part of the federal government responsibility to educate Indigenous children, in keeping with the national commitment to assure all children would be educated at least to the point of literacy. The native population was so widely scattered that it was impractical to have neighbourhood day schools for all of them. The overwhelming majority of students were enrolled by their parents and were not, as is so often stated, ripped out of the hands of their families. A very large number of the graduates of these schools have attested to the fact that they made them literate and enabled them to have productive careers and were their passports out of lives of grinding poverty.

Any reference to genocide in these matters is unutterably scurrilous. No one was attempting to kill these children; none of the alleged unmarked graves of presumed child victims of the schools have been verified as native student graves at all and students were meticulously accounted for. The attempt of some of the militants of the native victimhood industry to confect and charge the notion of cultural genocide, is particularly contemptible. The United Nations does not recognize such an activity; it is generally described as assimilation. The goal was to make the children fluent in one of Canada’s official languages, not to cause them to forget or forswear their own traditions. This is not normally regarded as a crime.

This was an allegation that grew out of John A. Macdonald’s famous statement about separating the child from the native, by which he meant liberating them from poverty, not strangling their knowledge of their ancestral traditions and culture. It is represented in the two bills mentioned that the imposition of criminal penalties on truth-telling about the residential schools is a form of accomplishing reconciliation between the native peoples and those who came after them to Canada, (and then supposedly attempted to exterminate them, at least culturally). Of course it is not reconciliation at all and is a blood libel on English and French Canadians.

Every informed person in Canada is aware that bad things happened in the schools and most people are prepared to accept the concept of attempted reparations for those misfortunes, even though they were contrary to the declared aims of the relevant legislation. As the much less damning facts slowly ease into the public consciousness, the militants of the victimhood industry are effectively attempting to criminalize the utterance of the full truth about these schools which were essentially positively intended and benefited thousands of students. Reconciliation will come when the subtleties and nuances of these facts are fitted together and the statutes are required to publish the truth and not just to suppress the facts.

The relevance of this to Carney’s response to the American removal of the president of Venezuela is that in the elaboration of foreign policy we are reduced to an inelegant stretch between condemning a dictator who is indisputably repugnant to any concept of liberty, democracy and human rights, without completely slamming the door on the vast infestation of Canadian anti-Americanism that has great difficulty, as the NDP showed on the weekend, avoiding the customary claptrap about international law having been offended. The result, in the one field as in the other, is mealy-mouthed compromise.

In fact, there is ample evidence that the former president of Venezuela and his wife were at the head of a vast operation of smuggling lethal narcotics illegally into the United States which killed many thousands of Americans over many years. By any definition this was an act of war and the Maduros having been duly indicted, Trump was acting on his duty and his right to protect the interests of the United States and to respond to acts of war and to bring accused criminals to justice. (Of course the U.S. criminal justice system convicts almost everyone because of the abuse of the plea bargain, but these people are almost certainly guilty.) The argument that it is contrary to international law for one country to seize the president of another country does not apply here since it is generally agreed, including by a majority of the Organization of American States, including Canada, that Maduro stole his last two elections and squandered his legitimacy by emasculating the Venezuelan legislature, packing the supreme court, silencing the independent media, repressing the entire population, and driving 20 per cent of Venezuelans, nearly 8 million people, out of their homeland as refugees.

What has really happened is that since no country will overtly attack the U.S. since Pearl Harbor in 1941, because of its military strength, but instead incite terrorists, Trump refuses to be drawn into hopeless wars of occupation as George W. Bush was, and has perfected these tactical masterpieces as in Iran and Caracas that are decisive, lightning fast, and incur no American casualties. Trump has all the cards and Venezuela, at great profit to itself, will sell its much -expanded (by the U.S.) oil production to Europe, replacing Russia, whose war Europe has been paying for even as it has begged the United States to help Ukraine. Mark Carney would have seemed less platitudinous and more worldly if he had said something about that.

National Post