RUBENSTEIN: Canadians will believe anything media and government tell them

'Culture wars' are shrill conflicts between different social groups struggling to politically or otherwise impose their own ideology on the rest of society. In Canada, current culture wars have been largely fought between what can be termed 'cultural socialists' — those prioritizing equal results and protection from emotional harm for minority groups — and both cultural liberals and conservatives, citizens who cherish free speech, objective truth, personal responsibility, equal opportunity and patriotism.A report written by Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, has just been released by the prestigious Macdonald-Laurier Institute examining public opinion in Canada about several culture war issues, many touching on historically disadvantaged groups.The study is based on a national representative survey conducted by online market research firm Maru Voice Canada on September 18 to 20, 2023 of 1,503 Canadian adults divided into cultural socialists (termed “woke” in the study) and cultural liberals/conservatives (called “unwoke” by the survey) based on which party they voted for in the 2021 federal election.As should not be surprising, voters for left-of-centre parties — the NDP, Liberals, and the Green Party — were 50 to 100% more likely to side with the woke position than those who voted for parties on the right, namely the Conservatives and the People’s Party of Canada.The surprise is that despite the growth of woke-ism in recent years, the survey found overall that Canadian attitudes about media stories reporting on culture-war issues “lean about 2 to 1 against the cultural socialist position.”For example, Canadians oppose the idea of separating students in schools by race into privileged and oppressed by 92 to 8; respondents oppose teaching children that “There is no such thing as biological sex, only gender preference” by 85 to 15; Canadians oppose gender reassignment surgery for under-16s by 4 to 1; by a 78 to 22 margin, Canadians agree that “political correctness has gone too far.”Not so for indigenous issues by a long shot: 60% of Canadians believe that “215 indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,” with just 15% disagreeing.The findings for Kamloops were listed under the heading of respondent attitudes explained by the controversial notion of “critical race theory” (CRT) — “the idea that invisible ‘structures’ of racism produce racial inequality and harm.”Setting aside the many compelling arguments that CRT is bad social science, the survey found that of the 19 questions dealing with race and history, overall 59% of respondents opposed the woke position. For example, a mere 5% said Canada is more racist than other countries and only 9% approve of activists removing statues without government approval.Conversely, “by a 79 to 21 ratio, respondents believed that ‘215 indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,’” a story which has no scientific or historical credibility “but which most media and virtually all politicians have been reluctant to contradict.”The study makes no comprehensive attempt to explain why the Kamloops belief is so much of an outlier although it offers some compelling clues. Seventy percent of those classified as woke versus 45% termed unwoke accepted the Kamloops canard.Given other studies showing a strong correlation between wokeness and age, education level, income, political power and media influence, the false Kamloops belief begins to become understandable.Allied beliefs are also at work: 54% of respondents consider the legacy of colonialism to be a problem today; 55% vs. 45% believe indigenous peoples should have a unique status because they were here first; by 48% for to 41% against, Canadians believe the harm from indigenous residential schools will continue rather than be resolved; and 19% of Canadians think children at residential schools were “purposefully killed” with another 39% saying that they died of neglect.But the most important determinant of this exceptionally high belief in the killing field at Kamloops lie in “political culture in Canada,” according to the study: “Much seems to come down to the culturally left-liberal political culture in Canada. That is, the elite norms that hold sway in the media and among mainstream politicians are predominantly culturally leftist.”In short Kaufmann argues, “It is well established that the media and politicians can cue the issues they want voters to focus on, making decisions to elevate some questions and ignore others.”This was especially true of nearly the whole media and most politicians who marched in lockstep in accepting the May 27 2021 media release from the Kamloops Indian Band that stated: “This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”There was no “stark truth,” no “confirmation of the remains of 215 children,” and no follow up efforts to exhume the reputed graves. The only evidence was the inclusive result of ground penetrating radar, a technique incapable of determining the existence of organic material, human or otherwise.Kaufman was aware of this lack of evidence, which is why he was able to state:“Canadians’ relatively high trust in institutions and cultural elites (compared to their British counterparts) grants considerable latitude to them to frame the issues that people talk about while neglecting other questions. There is no better illustration of this than the Kamloops mass graves question, where the code of silence practiced by the media and mainstream political parties has resulted in a clear majority of the public believing this false account.”But there is an additional factor that determined the hegemony of the false Kamloops story not mentioned in this study but touches directly on CRT: the critical role of indigenous elites in promoting the Kamloops myth.There is no doubt that Terry Glavin, the National Post’s star investigative journalist, helped rehabilitate Canada’s tarnished reputation as a genocidal country when he wrote an article for the National Post on May 26, 2022 titled The Year of the Graves: How the World’s Media Got it Wrong on Residential School Graves challenging critical aspects of this narrative that are also relevant to the many others that followed.Glavin’s article brought a much better understanding of the role the legacy media played in telling the story of mass burials, unmarked graves, missing children and even genocide at this former boarding school and others like it across the country.This role involved writing the most sensational headlines possible and mindlessly repeating the inflammatory but undocumented rhetoric claiming the reputed secret internment of unnamed Indian Residential School children, the result of the actions of wicked, even murderous, people.That said, Glavin and others reserved their critique of the mass graves and genocide myths for the media alone, ignoring the central role of elected politicians and indigenous leaders and activists in the process.This was a serious oversight: there have been hundreds of mainstream and alternative media stories directly quoting outrageous and unverified allegations made by local, regional and national chiefs and other indigenous leaders, seasoned culture warriors eager to jump on the CRT bandwagon.Glavin is not the only National Post writer who got things wrong about the spread of the mass graves and genocide hoaxes.Tristin Hopper, also one of the paper’s leading investigative journalists, argued in a September 6 2023 editorial titled Who Started Calling Residential School Burial Sites Mass Graves? that:“But there’s just one problem with claims that this (the existence of mass graves) was all an engineered (indigenous) hoax: The preliminary claims of First Nations performing the surveys did not state that these were “mass graves,” that they were deliberately concealed or that they were the result of homicide. At least in the beginning, the claims of “mass graves” or mass murder would stem mostly from foreign news outlets.Following the May 2021 Kamloops announcement, the many resolutions or statements about mass graves made one after the other from indigenous leaders, associations, including the Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve, the Final Resolution of Union of British Columbian Chiefs, representing more than 150 of the province’s Indian Bands and the BC Assembly of First Nations, representing the 203 First Nations in BC, make Hopper’s assessment as erroneous as Glavin’s.Why these and other seasoned journalists chose instead to parrot outrageous indigenous accusations in a respectful manner is unknown. However, it looks like just another example of the old-fashioned morally sentimental, unidimensional noble savage view of indigenous people as uncorrupted by Western civilization; far worse, it may be an implicit acceptance that because distortion, exaggeration and outright prevarication are expected aboriginal defensive responses to a troubled colonial history, they should either be forgotten or forgiven.If it is the latter, such a sentiment deserves to be called for what it is: the soft bigotry of low indigenous expectations for those fully assimilated indigenous leaders and advisors who should be judged by the same standards as all other Canadians.Ironically, given the pro-indigenous credentials of both journalists, either explanation would be an example of the unconscious bias CRT advocates chronically rails against.Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba, is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report.