Just when you thought it couldn’t get any lower.
The Trump administration is using the dark history of the residential schools as a new battleground to promote hate and disinformation. The news was announced by Undersecretary Sarah B. Rogers and emphasized online by Marco Rubio.
Rogers announced a travel ban and sanctions against five European campaigners who have been calling out online hate and disinformation. She specifically singled out Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index for her work monitoring the hate speech of groups that “question Canadian blood libels about residential schools.”
You would have to be very deep into the rabbit hole of extremist conspiracy hate to even know what blood libel has to do with the mass crimes against Indigenous children.
What’s chilling is that such marginal hate voices now have the full backing of the United States government. It represents a dangerous expansion of the MAGA hate machine onto Canadian soil.
It is also unacceptable interference in Canadian affairs.
The crimes happened.
Canada established a national process for gathering evidence from survivors. The evidence of the rapes, torture, starvation and mass deaths was prepared in a 4,000-page report through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
At no point was there ever any credible suggestion that these crimes didn’t happen.
The Commission found that the multi-generation practice of forcibly taking Indigenous children from their families represented a state plan for cultural genocide.
I worked for a dozen years with survivors of the notorious St. Anne’s Residential School over the ongoing legal injustices they face. The crimes they suffered – torture, child abuse, rape, forced abortions – were documented in a massive OPP police investigation that gathered 900 witness statements, thousands of pages of evidence and identified at least 180 perpetrators of crimes against children.
This evidence was in addition to the 154 ongoing cases before the courts at the time.
At no point did anyone claim that the torture and rape of generations of children at that school did not take place.
In 2006, the Parliament of Canada under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized the residential school policy as a crime against Indigenous people and issued a formal apology.
Following the TRC report, all Christian churches involved in the residential school crimes apologized, except the Catholic Church. I led the fight in Parliament, calling on the Pope to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in this dark history. That motion passed with overwhelming support in 2018.
In 2022, Pope Francis came to Canada to heal the wounds of that era and issued the historic apology to Indigenous people at Edmonton, Iqaluit and Quebec:
“I would like to begin what I consider a pilgrimage, a penitential pilgrimage. I have come to your native lands to tell you in person of my sorrow, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, to express my closeness and to pray with you and for you.”
The attempt by the United States government to erase this history as an excuse to launch a battle over “free speech” reveals just how dangerous the American government has become. European leaders have responded with a total denunciation of the attacks on European rights activists.
When I wrote about this issue on Facebook, my post was immediately targeted by Facebook as a threat to Facebook’s “Community standards and cybersecurity.”
The United States has shown itself to be increasingly unhinged and dangerous. MAGA has opened a very dangerous new front in its war against our country. Canadian leaders need to take this threat seriously. It is clear that the United States government is working on behalf of some marginal hate groups who are looking to exploit the trauma of the residential schools to promote racial hatred in Canada.
Will the American state begin sanctioning Canadian activists and political leaders who are determined to stop the hate denialism from spreading?
We will need everyone to be ready at the battlements to stop these treacherous haters from trying to undermine our social consensus. Our neighbour represents a very clear and treacherous threat to our sovereignty. We must be ready.
How long before Trump/Hegseth send 'troops' into Canada for 'security' reasons. They will come up with some convoluted reason to invade. We need to be realistic; there is no depth that they will not go to when they intend to steal our resources. The threat is real and those who think it cannot happen need to get their heads out of the sand.
Just so readers understand, the American government is setting the conditions to undermine Canada’s sovereignty. They don’t care about disinformation, Residential Schools or indigenous people. They just want revenge on people they hate. And they hate Canada.
Also, watch for their “protection” narratives. They are already launching cruise missiles into Nigeria to “protect Christians”. Last summer there was a US evangelist (Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s spiritual advisor at the pentagon) who travelled across Canada spreading disinformation that we are persecuting Christians.
When you start to layer these narratives on top of “Canada has critical minerals the US NEEDS for national security” and “Mexican cartels are now bringing fentanyl through Canada” then you begin to have a roadmap for the use of force that they have justified under the new National Security Strategy that says that everything in the Western Hemisphere needs to be controlled and made available to the US and intervention is back on the table.
Trump is severely mentally ill and is surrounded by people who want to exploit that for their own ends. They are feeding talking points into his ears that his addled brain repeats to the press.
None of this is benign. White House officials have met 3 times with the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project to support the breakup of Canada while decrying an ad using Ronald Reagan’s words as foreign interference in US elections.
If they get the opportunity, they will absolutely take measures like blockading shipping to Canada in international waters and harassing Canadians travelling to the US.
Individual Americans are okay. But America hates us for standing up to them when we should “know our place”.