HANNAFORD: Sure Carney's dad worked residential schools... What of it?

Far be it from me to run interference for Liberal leader Mark Carney, as he campaigns to lead Canada farther into his own personal vision of a compliant, socialist dystopia. However, those using a 1965 CBC interview with his residential-school-administrator father to undermine his name and reputation do so with spite and malice. They also proceed in significant error. First, none of us are personally responsible for what our fathers thought, said and did. 'Your dad was a drunk. Are you a drunk too?' is self-evidently not a bona fide question to a candidate for office. Nor is, 'your father was a residential school denialist, are you also a denialist too?'.If we all carry our own bags then, but not those of our parents, there is no reason — 'spite and malice' excepted — to make an exception for Carney. Mark Carney is accountable for what Mark Carney alone thinks and says. And heaven knows, his own public utterances are a sufficient font of anxious enquiry, starting with his green fetish, moving smoothly along to so-far unanswered questions about possible conflicts of interest, and his apparent enthusiasm for all things Chinese.Second however, and very much more to the point, the CBC tape doesn't say what his detractors want to imply. If you have three minutes, watch to the end..The knock on Robert Carney is that speaking of indigenous students, he said that one of the problems residential schools faced was 'cultural retardation.' Shocking, you see. Condescending. Dismissive. Racist, even. What a father for a prospective prime minister to have. He must renounce him and all his works.Today, we wouldn't use those words. But in 1965 we did, rather than the greater pejoratives from which people of taste and goodwill were trying to remove us. And what Carney pere was talking about, was how indigenous children raised in a bush culture, were overwhelmed by modernity when they arrived at residential schools. .They were at a disadvantage in fact, comparable to what an urban Canadian accustomed to electricity, the Internet, central heating, grocery stores and motor cars would encounter, were he parachuted into a place where none of those things were available — and nobody spoke English.Poor kids!In the CBC interview now circulating as a once-removed critique of Mark Carney, his father Robert Carney describes the unique educational programming designed to bring these children forward.It's worth listening to Robert Carney's aspirations for these children. They were entering the schools he said, often three, four, five or six years behind the grade average. And he acknowledged that many would simply go back to where they came from. Yet, the system would do what they could for them. From the recording: "We ‘re trying to keep them in both worlds. We want them to be able to read. We want them to be able to speak English. We want them to be able to do various operations in arithmetic. We want them to know about the world, the world of science, we want them to have the opportunity of expression in music and art….. But at the same time we want them to not forget their origins, not forget their backgrounds, to instil a sense of pride, and a sense of belonging and the culture from which they come. It is a good culture. And if they do go back to the old way of life, they will go back with skills that will help them with their old way of life.".'A good culture, then.' As for 'cultural retardation,' this was not a phrase for use only when speaking of rural indians. Cultural retardation existed all over the place, including among white people, where a marginalised group had been separated from the mainstream and fallen behind in wealth, accomplishment and opportunity. Robert Carney cites examples. And when he used the phrase about children from northern communities, it was not as a slur but as a clinical definition.So, even as some try now to vicariously condemn the son by reference to the father, the irony is that in his day the entire interview would have been widely dismissed: "There goes the CBC again, talking to some bleedin' heart liberal up in the NWT."Bottom line. Mark Carney should be examined, in depth and with rigour, on what he believes and intends.His late father, though? Sounds like a pretty good bloke to me. Leave him alone.

HANNAFORD: Sure Carney's dad worked residential schools... What of it?

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