Senator’s comments crossed the line
By Letter to the Editor on July 3, 2019.
Re: “Beyak gets unwarranted criticism for comments,” June 7 Ms. Wood’s letter defended some of Sen. Lynn Beyak’s, statements, published on the senator’s website and in a 2018 speech she made. Those statements resulted in her expulsion from the caucus of the federal Conservative Party, in 2018, and in her suspension from the Senate without pay, by the Senate this past May. Beyak was appointed in 2013. I therefore believe she has had enough time to understand and to appreciate her role as a member of the Senate, which is part of the Government of Canada. Beyak’s statements had two general themes, which are related. The first was that some good came from Indigenous children having attended residential schools. The second general theme was that Indigenous people are lazy, chronic whiners who are milking the residential schools issue to obtain handouts from the government. Ms. Wood’s letter dealt with and attempted to defend only the first theme stated above. Ms. Wood wrote that….”to deny that there were also some benefits (from residential schools), such as educations achieved and friendships gained, is unrealistic.” Unfortunately, Ms. Wood seems to have a narrow, selective, and rose-coloured understanding of history, and it bothers Ms. Wood that the senator’s statements have been described as racist. They are precisely that. As to the senator’s first general theme, residential schools were a part of official government policy, beginning in 1840 and carried on for well over 100 years, or about five successive generations. The policy was designed to destroy the languages and cultures of native peoples. In pursuit of this government policy, the schools damaged individuals and destroyed families. The parents of non-Indigenous children did not have their children forcibly taken from them. Those non-Indigenous parents did not suffer the anguish and indignities which the residential schools policy cast upon Indigenous parents. Students in non-residential schools did not encounter disease, malnourishment, physical and sexual abuse, and death in large numbers. A staff report to the Superintendent of Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, in 1910, documented that student mortality in B.C. residential schools was 30%, and in Alberta schools was 50%! The Superintendent, one Duncan Campbell Scott, responded to those death figures by stating that “…this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department….” By 1919, that department stopped recording student mortality statistics. In my opinion, the best that can be said about residential schools is that among those who survived, some were less damaged than others. It seems that only those who are either self-satisfiedly ignorant or willfully blind, and on the reactionary right, try to ignore that those schools functioned as slow-motion genocide, and that, because of their very design and implementation, residential schools could do no good. As to Beyak’s statements in the second theme of her letters, excerpted above, those statements, aside from being false and ludicrous, are snide, crass and disgusting, and all the more so coming from someone in high public office in our country. I would remind the senator, if by some chance she ever reads this, and I also remind those who agree with her unbecoming statements, that the Nazi Holocaust began before the crematoria and the gas chambers. That Holocaust began earlier, with derogatory, demeaning and racist words, stated by those in high public office and thereby sheathed in a false veneer of normality, of social acceptability, and of respectability. Beyak is unfit for her office, in my opinion, because she has crossed the line and seems unable to comprehend that there is a line. Her suspension from the Senate should be permanent. Her statements cannot be sheltered under the banner of freedom of speech because those statements tear the fabric of a civil society. Gregory R. Côté Irvine, Alta. 10-9
