Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public PolicyAccording to Blacklock’s Reporter, in a May 6, 2024 briefing note, Canada’s federal cabinet likened Chinese concentration camps to Canada’s Indian Residential School system. Diplomats privately told Chinese Communist Party officials “not to repeat Canada’s past mistakes,” said the document.These recently revealed facts, uncovered by Blacklock’s Reporter, quote the briefing note titled Assistance To China as saying, “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 was written for the Minister of International Development.As far back as 2020, the Commons subcommittee on foreign affairs documented crimes against China’s Uyghur Muslim minority, including slave labour, forced abortion, organ harvesting, and mass detention in concentration camps in Xinjiang Province.“Witnesses that appeared before the subcommittee were adamant that the atrocities committed by the Government of China amount to genocide as well as crimes against humanity,” wrote MPs. “Considering this evidence, the subcommittee notes the Government of Canada is not only responsible for punishing the crime of genocide, but for preventing one from occurring.” The Assistance To China briefing note also confirmed atrocities. “Credible reports from the United Nations bodies, from international human rights organizations and victims indicate Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been targeted for repression.”.The briefing note even went as far as claiming an equivalence between the treatment of Uyghurs and Canadian policies under the Indian Act. “State run forced labour programs continue to target ethnic Uyghurs, relocating them to factories across China, breaking up families and destroying communities,” it said.“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,” said the note. “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 briefing note failed to mention that in the late 19th and early 20th century voluntarily signed Canadian treaties with indigenous people said that “Her Majesty [Queen Victoria] agrees to maintain schools for instruction in such reserves hereby made as to Her Government of the Dominion of Canada may seem advisable, whenever the Indians of the reserve shall desire it.”Moreover, attendance at the day schools and Indian Residential Schools financed by the federal government was voluntary until 1920 and applied thereafter in a lackadaisical manner. In addition, attendance at the Indian Residential Schools required a signed application by the parents or guardians of its students. .The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the first to describe the Residential School system as “cultural genocide,” based on the unexamined recollections of a small, self-selected sample of former students.Unimpeached evidence and other shortcomings did not prevent then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from quickly telling the CBC: “I accept the Commission’s report, including the fact they used the word [cultural] ‘genocide,’” a politically loaded concept that could easily be used to describe the assimilation experience of millions of non-indigenous Canadian children whose home language was neither English nor French. Not content with the cultural genocide accusation, Trudeau sometimes used the unqualified term “genocide” when speaking about indigenous grievances. When he accepted the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) report, which concluded the deaths and disappearances of indigenous women and girls at the hands of mainly indigenous men amounted to genocide, his office quickly waffled by stating that acceptance of the MMIWG genocide charge was not the same as officially supporting the legal definition. The rejection of “official support” may have been at least partly based on the elementary fact that actual genocide is a systematic effort that “involves … acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a [different] national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” as opposed to uncoordinated individual attacks against members of one’s own group.No such destructive intention can be attributed to the Indian Residential Schools, not the least because they employed many indigenous people during their entire existence and show no evidence of even a single child murdered by staff members.As for China, Trudeau and all members of his cabinet abstained from a 2021 Commons vote on a motion censuring China for genocide. The motion nevertheless passed 266 to 0..“The primary concern we have as a government that has always been responsible about using this extremely loaded term is not applying it to things that don’t meet the very clear, internationally recognized criteria around genocide,” Trudeau said at the time. He could have said the very same thing about allegations of genocide against aboriginal Canadians.“There is no question there have been tremendous human rights abuses reported out of Xinjiang and we are extremely concerned,” Trudeau told reporters on February 16, 2021. “But when it comes to the application of the very specific word ‘genocide’ we simply need to ensure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed.”None of these I’s were dotted or T’s crossed when the Liberal Party-dominated House of Commons gave unanimous consent in favour of a motion on October 27, 2022 calling on the federal government to recognize Canada’s residential schools as genocidal institutions.Leah Gazan, the NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre, introduced the motion following Question Period. (Gazan brought forward a similar motion the year before, but it did not receive unanimous consent.) “Today I lift up survivors, families, and communities who have sacrificed so much in order for people across Canada to know the truth; that what happened in residential schools was a genocide. I’m grateful to parliamentarians who unanimously passed my motion recognizing the truth of Canada’s history,” Gazan said in a statement.Overall, then, Trudeau’s reluctance to use the term genocide to describe the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs has never applied to his Liberal Party’s very different Gazan-friendly interpretation of the treatment of Canada’s indigenous people..As for current Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his address on September 30, Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, he mentioned “the devastating legacy of the residential school system,” but made no mention of genocide. Nor has he done so in other statements.Conversely, Carney has used the term “genocide” when commemorating other events, such as the Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day, but has been more circumspect regarding its application to the Canadian context, often following the lead of official inquiries or international court rulings before formally applying the term. This reluctance has drawn criticism from some advocates who urge him to make a clear statement acknowledging Canada’s role in alleged lethal violence against indigenous people.With all this hypocritical doublespeak about indigenous genocide, no wonder public opinion polls in Canada show a solid majority of Canadians (60-66% in 2022-2023 polls) agree that indigenous peoples in Canada were the target of some form of genocide during the country’s formation. The consensus is even stronger regarding the residential school system, with around seven in ten Canadians (70% in 2015 and 69% of young people in 2021) agreeing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s characterization of the policy as “cultural genocide.”Following the 2019 MMIWG National Inquiry’s final report, which concluded the state had perpetrated genocide, a slight majority of Canadians (52% in an August 2025 poll) agreed with using the term “genocide” to describe the broader history of policies toward indigenous peoples. From a factual perspective, however, these beliefs about the genocidal treatment of indigenous people in Canada have no factual basis rooted in solid empirical evidence.This lack of evidence allowed People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier to use the September 30 National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to post a message on X challenging widely accepted accounts of Canada’s residential school system.In his post, Bernier wrote: “On this ‘National Day for Truth and Reconciliation,’ let’s remember that no bodies were found, that the residential schools’ ‘genocide’ is a hoax, and that reconciliation requires an end to the bs, the victim mentality, the fake white guilt, and the grifting based on it.” It is worth pondering how many other prominent Canadians share this sentiment but are too afraid to say so publicly.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
