Climate genocide, pipeline genocide, prison genocide … there are few contentious Canadian issues that haven’t been equated to genocide
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In recent weeks, it’s become popular among Canada’s activist groups and even mainstream politicians to accuse Israel of “genocide.” In a since-deleted Thursday evening social media post, for one, NDP MP Don Davies accused Israel of “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. The United Church of Canada has also begun using the g-word in its official literature.
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The charge doesn’t hold up on any material grounds. Unlike most genocided people, the Palestinian population has been soaring dramatically ever since the 1960s — all while retaining their traditional language and religion. Israel’s prosecution of its current conflict against Hamas, meanwhile, has featured any number of factors that are markedly out-of-step with an attempted genocide, including detailed evacuation orders and a rate of civilian casualties markedly lower than the global average.
But the charge doesn’t need to make sense, because it turns out Canada has been abusing the term “genocide” for quite some time. Coined amidst the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, “genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of an entire demographic of people.
While the most notable genocides involve systematized mass-murder, it’s not a requirement. As per the official definition struck in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide can also include attempts to erase a people via birth control or indirect methods such as famine. It’s on these grounds that Canada has officially accused China of genocide regarding its Uyghur minority. Although Beijing is not mass-murdering the Uyghurs, they are rounding them up into “re-education” camps and mandating forced sterilization with the explicit intention of destroying the Uyghur way of life.
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But among Western academic and activist circles, “genocide” has now been stretched to apply to almost anything, from emissions policy to the ethnic ratios in prisons. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of just how much of Canadian life has been accused of being genocidal.
‘Climate genocide’
Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion — two radical environmental groups that have made it their business to block bridges, destroy art and glue themselves to things — now use this term reflexively. They may have gotten the idea from the late Marshall Islands foreign minister Tony de Brum, who in 2015 started telling interviewers that if rising sea levels forced his country’s evacuation, this was “equivalent in our minds to genocide.”
Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil both advocate the near-immediate abandonment of fossil fuels — a situation likely to spur a global famine with decidedly genocidal effects. But the term “climate genocide” has also found its way into the literature of less-radical groups. The progressive non-profit LeadNow, for instance, targeted a petition at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accusing him of putting “all of civilization at risk” with his climate policy.
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“It’s worth noting that that is not exaggeration — your money is funding climate genocide,” they wrote.
Canada’s ‘ongoing genocide’
It is relatively uncontroversial that the Government of Canada has committed at least one genocide in the past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was initially hesitant to declare the Indian Residential School system an example of “cultural genocide” — but they ultimately went with the term given the huge volume of evidence that the stated intention of the schools was to eradicate Indigenous language and culture. Most notoriously, Department of Indian Affairs superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott stated openly in 1920 that “our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”
The final report of the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, published in 2019, was far less diligent in its decision to declare that Indigenous women’s disproportionate experience of violent crime could be attributed to state-sanctioned genocide. In fact, it even extended the charge of genocide to anyone in the LGBT community.
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“The truth is that we live in a country whose laws and institutions perpetuate violations of basic human and Indigenous rights,” it read. “These violations amount to nothing less than the deliberate, often covert campaign of genocide against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.”
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Genocidal pipelines
Canadian oil and gas pipelines have been accused a couple of times of acting as instruments of genocide. The project to twin the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline was slammed as genocidal in a Toronto Star op-ed. Kayah George, a 22-year-old member of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, wrote that the expansion project was “nothing short of genocide against my people.”
The charge was premised on the notion that a significant oil spill would destroy the local ecology, and thus destroy the traditional food source, home and traditional ancestor of the Tsleil-Waututh. “Those who back the pipeline do not see the sea as a living being,” she wrote. And the group Indigenous Climate Action soon promoted the article with the claim that Trans Mountain was a “genocidal pipeline.”
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Line 3, a similar pipeline expansion that would run from Alberta to Wisconsin, was referred to as “genocide” several times in a 2021 column in The National Observer – as well as being dubbed “a serious threat to life on this continent.” By proxy, author Evelyn Austin also accused Canadian banks of being genocidal through their financing of the project. “The banks fund Enbridge, Enbridge funds police surveillance and the cycles of genocide and extraction in the name of return on investment continue,” wrote Austin.
The ‘genocide’ of insufficient harm reduction
As far back as 2008, this charge was being levelled by no less than Julio Montaner, the Vancouver physician widely credited with devising the drug therapy that transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. In 2008, Montaner said that the then Conservative government’s opposition to safe injection sites constituted genocide. “When you neglect purposely a percentage of the population that can be defined on the basis of a particular characteristic, that’s genocide,” he said.
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It’s now become pretty routine for activists to accuse governments of genocide in relation to the overdose crisis. Alberta harm reduction activist Euan Thomson recently penned a blog post outlining why the “unregulated drug toxicity crisis can justifiably be framed as a genocide killing more than one million people.” It also appeared in a June 2021 collection of letters published by the Ontario Harm Reduction Society. “The lack of effective actions by Government has equated to a clear message that our lives are disposable and feels nothing short of supported genocide,” it read.
The ‘genocidal’ prison system
In sharp contrast to the United States, Canada actually has one of the world’s lowest incarceration rates — and this rate has been in virtual freefall under the Trudeau government. But among those prisoners, the rate of convicted offenders who are Indigenous is well out of proportion to their overall share of the Canadian population.
One way to view it is as a symptom of generations of shabby federal treatment. When Ottawa corrals an entire population onto ill-funded reserves and then puts several generations of their children through residential schools, the natural result is going to be communities with dramatically elevated levels of criminality. This was the view espoused in Parliamentary testimony earlier this year by Darren Montour, Chief of the Six Nations Police Service. He attributed high criminality among Indigenous communities to the “social traumas” wrought by government action. “We still have a responsibility to ensure the public safety of our communities, because 99 per cent of the time the offender is Indigenous and so is the victim,” he said.
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Or, there’s the view of prison reform non-profits and the oft-cited Indigenous academic Pam Palmater: The Canadian prison system is itself a tool of genocide. In 2021, the West Coast Prison Justice Society released a report asserting that the very notion of “incarcerating Indigenous people in prisons” constituted a “genocidal practice” and “crimes against humanity.” In a 2022 op-ed published in The Lawyer’s Daily, Palmater said that high rates of Indigenous incarceration were a federal plot to clear lands for “the extractive industry,” and is “nothing short of genocide.”
‘Trans genocide’
This one appeared in a CBC headline in 2015, when the network brought on U.S. academic Tarynn Witten to speak of a “quiet genocide” against trans people. The basic charge being that anything short of total societal affirmation for trans identities constituted an attempt to erase the community’s existence.
Back then, the idea of a “trans genocide” was controversial enough that producers brought on Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress., to dispute the notion that allegations of inequitable treatment were sufficient to constitute genocide.
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But any such hedging on the term has gradually fallen away as it has become a fixture on protest signs and academic literature. References to trans genocide even appeared in a 2022 report by Canada’s Department of Justice.
In a legal profile of “Trans, Two-Spirit, and Non-Binary People,” authors referenced a paper co-authored by Witten entitled The Next Strange Fruit—Hate Crimes, Violence and Genocide Against the Global Trans Communities.”
The paper was cited as a source for the line “researchers have found that trans people are exposed to various forms of discrimination and violence in interpersonal and institutional contexts.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Not that it would be responsible to extrapolate this as an explanation for wider political insanities … but it turns out an awful lot of us have been affected more deeply from COVID-19 infection than previously thought. A national study by Statistics Canada concluded that as many as 3.5 million Canadians are experiencing fatigue, brain fog or shortness of breath “that could not be explained by anything else.” So, that’s a cohort larger than the entire Metro Vancouver area that is just a bit crankier and more easily confused than they were before the pandemic – which is probably having some social effect.
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The House of Commons was plunged into an all-night slog of procedural votes on Thursday. The marathon was due to the Conservatives’ stated intention to make Parliament as unbearable as possible until the Liberals order their senators to pass a bill exempting the carbon tax from fuels used to heat barns. It’s admittedly a somewhat niche reason to bury the House of Commons in meaningless amendments, but the Tories are trying to make a point about senators (particularly ones that are supposed to be independent), obstructing legislation that’s already passed the House.
The National Post’s Ottawa bureau was there, and chose to observe, Jane Goodall-like, how MPs reacted to hour after hour of boring amendment votes. They came away with these observations:
- Karina Gould, Adam van Koeverden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all signed mountains of Christmas cards.
- Many MPs violated the rules of His Majesty’s chamber by sneaking in food (including, in one case, popcorn).
- Conservative MP John Brassard put his feet up.
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