On many Canadian university campuses, students are told that they need to be “allies” to marginalized groups. Today, we often focus on Indigenous populations, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of colour. Indigenous people are given, by far, a bigger spotlight because of Canada’s implementation of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) and the accounts of atrocities within those institutions.
An example often used in universities is the Kamloops IRS unmarked mass grave scandal of May 2021. This example is given in post-secondary courses, but so far, no real graves or bodies have been uncovered, and no excavations have been conducted or planned thus far. Recently researchers linked to the Frontier Centre have found the death certificates of a number of the so-called missing children from the Kamloops Residential School.
We know there was abuse in Indian Residential Schools. To doubt it is to idealize humanity and invalidate its victims. There has been considerable suffering, yet it has all but drowned the good in sorrow. The progressive doctrine fails to include that egregious behaviour occurs perpetually within our imperfect species. Unfortunately, crimes are inevitable, but the guilty must be held accountable.
While I believe that it is important to support those who are genuinely victimized, I do not believe that an entire race of Canadians should be condemned for the putative wrongs of their ancestors. In my experience, no progressive professor would support my position, as it damages their narrative that all white people are colonial oppressors and everyone else is a victim. I hear variations of this argument almost every day. This perspective, of course, renders both groups helpless: the whites, irredeemable, the rest, incapable.
I am a third-year undergraduate student majoring in political science and minoring in economics. I have experienced many attempts by my university to indoctrinate its students. If not for the guidance of my family and a staunch belief in my values, I would have been swept away by that current of irrationality long ago.
My professors tell me indirectly that I, a descendant of peaceful Amish farmers, am responsible for “Indigenous genocide” because of my white skin. That my family in rural Ontario are racists, despite having lived here since the 1820s and contributed to the founding of this country. I am told, though I, too, have suffered childhood abuse, manipulation, and coercion, I am just as guilty as those who committed unconscionable actions toward Canada’s most vulnerable: her Native children. Having visited reserves and experienced Indigenous culture, I have grown to treasure my experiences and plan to expand on them further.
Universities should not be deciding what their students should think. Rather, they should teach pupils how to think and give them opportunities to explore different and opposing viewpoints. We students are being coerced into adopting the progressive ideology, and when we disagree with our professors, we are often silenced by them, or even other students. When someone is not given the opportunity to question or challenge beliefs, they are reduced to another cog in the mass machine of Marxism, capable only of spreading propaganda.
Obviously, this is not a learning environment that should be promoted, much less publicly subsidized, and it is not an education that Canadian students, nor the greater population, should accept. We should not be pouring our hard-earned tax dollars into something so destructively against our Western values of free speech, thought and opinion. If we do not change, this educational indoctrination will be a cause of our collective national demise.
Sophia Leis is the associate editor at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. She is a third-year university student majoring in political science. She is passionate about Canadian indigenous issues, economics, and Western cultural influence.
