Chris Selley: Wab Kinew walks a fine line on residential school ‘denialism’

Say what you will about his government’s performance, you can’t say Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew hasn’t cut an interesting figure. He’s confident, charismatic, optimistic, genuinely telegenic and witty, certainly by the low standards of Canadian politics. As such he can buck trends and defend doing so articulately and with a smile. That can get you a long way in Canadian politics. (One major component of the media bias against conservatives is a more general media bias in favour of politicians who are perceived as nice, congenial or entertainingly quick on their feet, as opposed to necessarily compelling on questions of policy.)

Prime example: Recently Kinew came out against “criminalizing” expressions of “residential-school denialism” — as proposed by NDP MP Leah Gazan and firmly supported by federal NDP leader Avi Lewis. It’s not shocking: the Liberal Indigenous caucus in Ottawa doesn’t publicly support such a law, and Kinew is not cut from today’s federal-NDP cloth. For one thing, very much unlike Lewis, he’s open to building a pipeline east through Canada from Alberta.

“I can tell you, there’s probably a lot of people (in Manitoba) who would like to work on a pipeline,” he told reporters in July at a meeting of the premiers in Charlottetown. “So, I’m open to it, and it’s going to make Canada stronger. But of course, we want to see things done in the right way. We want Indigenous governments on side.”

The latter isn’t at all far-fetched. There are plenty of examples of First Nations investments in resource projects to employ and enrich their members, of course. You just have to get your news from National Post or APTN to hear about them reliably. On Tuesday, TC Energy announced an economic partnership with a coalition of five First Nations located along the Coastal GasLink route, who will now take on partial ownership of the project. Such First Nations are terribly inconvenient for dominant media/activist narratives and Kinew has been taking considerable heat from the anti-development crowd for not opposing a pipeline. He has just kind of shrugged it off.

Another of those narratives now supports “criminalizing residential-school denialism.” Kinew could have just fudged it. He’s smart enough to know any such law would be toothless, as is Canada’s “ban on Holocaust denial” (on which Gazan’s bill is explicitly modelled).

“I have a lot of respect for MP Gazan, but I don’t think we can criminalize this,” Kinew said last Friday. “I think we have to just do the continued work of educating people and trying to combat misinformation.”

As a concept, that’s 10 out of 10. You can judge Kinew’s idea of “educating people and trying to combat misinformation” in a video Kinew posted after the province purchased a campsite on the well-known former grounds of the Brandon Residential School and announced the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation was now in charge of researching and documenting who’s buried there.

“Some bad people today say, ‘show me the graves’. Well, right here,” he says, gesturing at the Brandon Residential School Cemetery, which is marked as such. That’s not remotely the same thing as the allegations in Kamloops, B.C. of secret mass burials that have driven the “show me the graves” movement, but he invites people to equate the two.

The fact is we have always known that some children died at residential schools, mostly of tuberculosis, including in Brandon. It’s better documented, notably by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, than a lot of Canadian history. This really shouldn’t ever have become the controversy it did. It was like being shocked to find gambling in a casino, when you had never even checked what a casino was before going. But Kinew, I think, is at the very least managing the issue less tendentiously than the federal Liberals have.

I don’t know whether or why Kinew would ever be interested in the federal leadership of his party. The notion of actually winning elections has been pure fantasy for the NDP forever, and they know it, and I’m sure he knows it too. But I’m really not sure Avi Lewis can win a seat, let alone a substantial number of MP seats. If Kinew was inclined to mount a challenge at that point, party members would be crazy to look askance.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com