What's all this nonsense about making Canada the 51st state?

News travels slowly to this corner of the forest, especially in winter. It has just come to the attention of this dual citizen that President Trump, in a meeting with Blackie McBlackface, Emperor of Canuckistan, that the latter's country would be better off joining the Excited States of America as the 51st state. Why, he said to Junior, you could even be the first governor. Or if not you, then Wayne Gretsky.

Chief Walking Goose allowed as how the frostbacks he rules might not want to join a country where everyone has a gun for self-defence, but not everyone has health insurance coverage provided by the government. But, said the Donald, if you don't join us voluntarily, we have ways of making you see reason (read: the way I see things).

Did he mean another invasion? As President James Madison said way back in 1812, "it would only be a matter of marching." Even President Trump, who ignores history that he doesn't like, knows how that turned out. So he assured M Trudeau and his minions that he wasn't talking about an armed invasion. Goodness, no! A 25% tariff on all Canadian goods and services would do just as well, or even better.

Since he said that, Canadians of all political stripes have had their knickers* in a twist over how to respond to the threatened tariffs. Some argue for a tit-for-tat tariff. [DJT sez: "OK then. Tat!"] Others say maybe joining the US of A isn't such a bad idea. It would cure their government's terminal wokeness once and for all, without an election, let alone an assassination.

What they are forgetting is that Canada and the US of A have been arguing about, threatening, negotiating and renegotiating tariffs since before Canada was even a country. In fact, it was the threat of American tariffs against Canada that forced the assorted provinces to unite as one country (more or less), beginning in 1867. What follows is adapted from Stone Country, by George Bowering, Canada's first poet laureate, Penguin Canada 2003. 

The US war with the Confederate States of America complicated Canadian politics greatly. A lot of Canadians joined the Blue Coats to fight against the slave economy. But the British, still smarting from bad experiences with their former colonies, built warships that wound up in Grey Coat hands. 

These ships made a great nuisance of themselves in the Union shipping lanes, and when the war was all but over, President Lincoln started talking about reprisals, especially the receiving-huge-acreage kind of reprisals. Luckily this sort of talk tapered off after Lincoln's assassination, and the work was left to the feckless Fenians. 

In 1871, the case was closed when Britain agreed that it should pay some monetary compensations. But the big new republic was a place in which business and the military were learning to butter each other's buttocks. If military annexation was not going to look all that good, there were always economic means.

In 1854 the US and British North America had signed a Reciprocity Treaty, which had proven quite handy for the businessmen on both sides, and during their big war, the US had been happy to get fish, food, minerals and wood without paying tariffs on them. But when the war was over, the US Senate began to listen to the complains of businessmen whose business was fish, coal and lumber. 

Listen, said these businessmen, we need protection from these foreign traders. Don't you remember that we just recently fought a couple of wars with them? Don't you realize that if we put up tariffs they will eventually beg for annexation so they can make a living? 

The US withdrew from the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866, whereupon some economic realists proposed the idea of a confederation of the several provinces. Said Sir John Eh Macdonald, who would become the first prime minister, "I'll drink to that!", and so the Dominion of Canada was born. 

This was the kind of thing that made Canadian schoolchildren decide that history was kind of boring. US schoolchildren, of course, never heard abut it. But over the years there have been a lot of apoplectic fits, suicides and desertions caused by the tariffs that keep showing up at the US border.

The lesson for DJT, should he deign to pay attention, is that Canadians will find a way to keep the World's Longest Undefended Border (TM) intact and still do business with the new imperial America. Most of them -- let's say 50% + 1 -- reject the idea of joining the Excited States of America, even if staying out costs them a bit more. As those arch-Canucks, Bob & Doug McKenzie, would put it:

* Note from Ed. to American readers: "Knickers" is what the Brits call ladies' underpants. Canadians call them "panties", like Americans do.

Canadian residential school deaths: a calm look at the facts

Ed. here. At the risk of sounding like a Canadian, I'm going to start with a disclaimer (and apology, of sorts). Canadians have been agonizing for decades now about what to call the indigenous people who have inhabited the Great White North for 1000s of years. Names like "Indians" and "Eskimos" are no longer politically correct. 

In fact, the football team formerly known as the Edmonton Eskimos announced just a few days ao that it will now be called the "Elks". The people known as Eskimos would prefer to be called Inuit, so that's easy. But the people we called "Indians", wishing to avoid the stigma of being taken for south Asians [??? Ed.], can't decide if they want to be called "First Nations" or "Dene" or "Aboriginal" or "Indigenous" or just "the people". So in this article, I'm going to stick with "Indians" because this is about what were called "Indian residential schools". 

Last week, the remains of 215 children were uncovered in unmarked burial sites on the site of the Kamloops (BC) Indian Residential School. The school was established in 1890 and from 1892 run by a Roman Catholic order of religious, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. It was once the largest residential school in Canada, with its enrolment peaking at 500 in the 1950s. 

It was in operation until 1969, when it was taken over by the federal government to be used as a day school residence. It closed in 1978. The school building still stands today, and is located on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation. 

It should be noted that the first such residential school had opened almost 60 years earlier, in Brantford ON. A handful of schools run by mostly Protestant missionary groups had been established even before that. In 1847, Egerton Ryerson, superintendent of schools in Upper Canada (today's Ontario), wrote a report recommending the establishment of residential schools for Aboriginal students in the province. Methodist missionaries established a number of such schools in southern Ontario in the 1850s. Other schools were opened in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories in the 1860s.

Following Confederation, the Canadian government became more involved in residential schools, but since education was left to the provinces under the Constitution, the federal government left the operation of such schools to various churches. About 70% of them were run by Roman Catholic orders, with the remainder being looked after by Protestants. 

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), a body set up in 2015 to investigate these schools, they were boarding schools for Indigenous children, that didn’t exist just to teach them school subjects, but "primarily to break their link to their culture and identity."

Sir John A. Macdonald, the anti-French, anti-Catholic, racist drunk who became Canada's first prime minister, had this to say. "When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. 

"It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men."

In other words, the aim of Sir John Eh was to turn Indian kids into "apples" -- red on the outside and white on the inside.  

According to TRC reports, at least 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Métis children passed through the residential school system. They were separated from their families, forbidden from speaking their own language or engaging in their cultural practices. In addition to attending class, students at many schools had to perform chores to maintain the school and even sometimes do farm work to feed the school.

Many were mistreated and abused, physically and sexually. Students were often malnourished or underfed, and lived in poor housing conditions that threatened their safety. Infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza often ran rampant among the students, leading to many deaths. 

The TRC identified 3,200 deaths as part of its investigation. They note that indigenous children in residential schools died at far higher rates than other Canadian children, even for the time. Many children died from infectious diseases (notably tuberculosis), fires in school buildings, suicide, drowning, and other accidents.

All too often, the schools and/or government failed to record students' names, gender, or even the cause of death. The deaths themselves were often unrecorded. Some students got sick and were sent home, where they later died. Métis students whose attendance at school wasn't funded by the federal government but who may have died there were not counted.

In its report, the TRC lamented that "due to the limitations in the records, it is probable that there are many student deaths that have not been recorded in the register because the record of the death has not yet been located. Most of these children died far from home, and often without their families being adequately informed of the circumstances of death or the place of burial."

Children who died at school were likely buried at the school, or in nearby municipal or church cemeteries. Some of these locations are known and the cemeteries still maintained, but some are not. As the TRC wrote, "For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance."

Such as the case at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. People had known and spoken for years about the existence of a graveyard, but until this year no-one had looked for it. Disturbing though it is, the discovery of the site is disturbing, but not unique. Nor is it evidence of an unspeakable atrocity. It is not one mass grave, but a hiterto undiscovered burial site. That's all.

For that reason, it is unhelpful for the usual gang of virtue-signalling politicians, SJWs and members of the human rights industry to use words like "genocide", and demand apologies -- not to mention "reparations" -- from the Roman Catholic Church and its supposed pope, as if they bear sole responsibility for acts and omissions of decades ago.

The Most Rev. Thomas Collins, Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, expressed his sorrow in a statement released on June 3rd. Yesterday he told the CBC's Rosie Barton [naturally. Ed.] that the archived records of the OMI had always been available, so it was "unhelpful" for the Prime Minister of Canuckistan (who supports abortion but claims to be a Catholic) to threaten to take the Church to court to obtain production of those documents. 

In response, Carolyn Bennett, who carries Mr Socks's bags on "Crown-Indigenous Relations", told Cacklin' Rosie that it was "unhelpful for Cardinal Collins to call Mr Trudeau's statement 'unhelpful'." Expect more such name-calling, finger-pointing, virtue-signalling and scape-goating in the weeks to come. It's the Canadian way.

Footnote: Yesterday, a mob of iconoclasts ["mostly preaceful protesters", shurely! Ed.] succeeded in pulling down the statue of Egerton Ryerson which stood in front of the Toronto university named after him. It is rumoured that there may have been one or two Indians in the mob. 

A few days earlier, the city council of Charlottetown PEI caved to the pressure and removed the statue pictured in "What's wrong with this picture?", WWW 11/5/21. When it comes to promoting "truth and reconciliation", such actions seem to me "unhelpful"!

What's wrong with this picture?

Here you see one of Walt's agents in conversation with a statue of Sir John Eh Macdonald (aka Sir John A. Macdonald), the first prime minister of Canada. The statue was erected in 1967 in beautiful downtown Charlottetown PEI, as a Centennial project.

What's wrong with it? It's actually a pretty good statue, in a genre that was popular until recently, showing historical or other figures standing or sitting in poses such that people can have their pictures taken with them. Any objections? Well yes... 

Sir John, very much a product of his times and Scottish origins, was a hard drinker ("Single malt, but make it a double!"), anti-French, and anti-Catholic. He was also determined to civilize the natives, by means such as sending their kids to residential schools where they could be turned into quasi-whites.

Today, Sir John is called a white supremacist by, among others, the Epekwitk Assembly of Councils, a joint forum that includes the councils of both Abegweit First Nation and Lennox Island First Nation. (For our American readers, "First Nations" is the current politically correct term for the people who used to be called "Indians".) 

In keeping with the current fad for iconoclasm, the Assembly petitioned the Charlottetown city council to "amend" the art installation and "tell the true story of this individual and begin to address the trauma that its presence is continuing to perpetuate." 

The councillors, with the exception of Clr Mike Duffy [That Mike Duffy? The erstwhile Senator? Ed.] voted to leave the statue where it is, albeit with some modifications. The assembly made five suggestions to the city, viz:

Add another figure, such as an Indigenous child or elder. 

Fill in or seal off the empty space on the bench so it can't be used for photo opportunities like this picture.

Install signage so viewers understand "the devastating role that Sir John A. Macdonald played in the Indigenous history of Canada." 

If the artist engaged is not Indigenous, a Mi'kmaw artist should be hired as a consultant.

Complete the work as soon as reasonably possible.

In voting against the resolution, Councillor Duffy referenced a survey last summer that indicated the majority of respondents wanted the statue to remain as is. The other councillors predictably said what the majority of the people want doesn't matter. Such are the times.

Canadian money more funny-looking than ever

Americans have long made fun of Canada's "funny money". As you can see, the paper "beaverbucks" come in different colours. On the front are pictures of a foreign woman and four dead white men who many Canadians fail to recognize.

Four men and only one woman seemed politically incorrect to the Liberal government of Canuck Prime Minister "Mr Socks" Trudeau. To make matters worse, not one of the five people pictured is a vizmin. So a decision was made -- an egregious example of tokenism, even by Canadian standards -- to replace one of the white men with a black woman.

Conveniently, the white man who was the first to die was Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister (and a Conservative!), about whom there has been a good deal of controversy in recent months, similar to the controversy in the Excited States of America about Robert E. Lee. So, away you go, John Eh, and a big welcome to Viola Desmond, now appearing on the new $10 (= $7.50 in real money) banknote which goes into circulation this week.

featuring Viola Desmond’s portrait will go into circulation in a week, just over 72 years after she was ousted from the whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, N.S.

The Canadian Ministry of Truth describes the late Viola Desmond as a civil rights pioneer and businesswoman. Her business was a hairdressing salon (surprised?) which she operated in the "historic north end" of Halifax NS, home to one of Canada's oldest black communities. On 8 November 1946 -- nearly a decade before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama -- Ms Desmond was dragged out of the Roseland Theatre by police, arrested, kept in the lockup for 12 hours and fined. 63 years later, the provinice of Nova Scotia issued her a posthumous pardon and apology.

A spokesthingy for the black community said he hopes the new banknote will "inspire young girls to pursue their dreams and push back against injustice." He went on to say, "I'm hoping having Viola on the bill will prompt people to want to know what's the story behind her, because still, there's a lot of people who have no idea who she was and what she stands for."

Walt says good luck with that. It won't be surprising (to me) if a lot of Canucks refuse to accept the new bill on the grounds that it just doesn't look like money, at least not Canadian money. Some will wonder if the queen had a facelift. I also predict some comments from the usual gang of NPCs that Ms Desmond has been made to look as if she was "passing". All this for political correctness!