A federal briefing note shows cabinet officials privately told the Chinese Communist regime not to “repeat Canada’s past mistakes,” directly comparing Beijing’s mass detention of Uyghurs to the Indian Residential School system.The May 6, 2024 document, titled Assistance To China and prepared for the minister of international development, reveals that Canadian diplomats drew parallels between China’s forced labour programs and residential schools, despite international findings that Beijing’s actions amount to genocide.“Canada continues to urge China not to repeat Canada’s past mistakes and to recognize the harm that its current policies are inflicting on ethnic and religious minorities in China,” the note said.Blacklock's Reporter said the Commons subcommittee on foreign affairs concluded in 2020 that China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims — including forced abortions, organ harvesting, slave labour, and mass internment — constituted both genocide and crimes against humanity. Despite that finding, the Liberal government has resisted using the word “genocide” to describe Beijing’s actions..The briefing note acknowledged “credible reports” from the UN and human rights organizations confirming Uyghur repression but framed it through a domestic lens. “Uyghur children in Xinjiang continue to be forcibly placed in residential schools where the curriculum prioritizes the Mandarin language and fails to encourage Uyghur language, culture and religion,” it said. “Canada is still dealing with the intergenerational harm caused by past policies that separated Indigenous children from their parents and placed them in residential schools.”The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called the residential school system “cultural genocide,” language accepted by then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. .Yet Trudeau and his cabinet abstained from a 2021 Commons vote condemning China for genocide, which passed unanimously 266–0.At the time, Trudeau defended his decision by warning against “using this extremely loaded term” without meeting “the very clear, internationally recognized criteria around genocide.” He acknowledged “tremendous human rights abuses” in Xinjiang but said Ottawa needed to “dot the I’s and cross the T’s” before applying the term.The newly surfaced briefing note now shows that even as the government publicly hesitated to label Beijing’s actions as genocide, it was privately drawing direct moral comparisons between China’s concentration camps and Canada’s own residential school legacy.
