After Murray Sinclair died in Winnipeg on November 4, 2024, many Canadians learned a good deal about the life and work of the former Senator, Judge, and Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). But given how glowing the published tributes were in the mainstream media, it seems right to point out a few things about his work on the TRC that are not laudatory and have not been mentioned in any published accounts.
Like the IRS system itself, Murray Sinclair was a mixture of both light and darkness. After the 7-volume, 3,500-page TRC Report was published in 2015, a group of scholars associated with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy identified several things that were unfortunately not as clearly explained as they should have been by the Commission’s $60 million Report.
Of chief importance is the fact that the Report’s Summary volume failed to summarize the other volumes’ contents adequately. As a great many Canadians — including many mainstream journalists — seem to have read only the 382-page Summary, this was a significant flaw.
The Report’s emotionally charged claims — many frequently repeated in the mainstream media — were another. Significantly, Volume 1 of the Report begins by claiming that the goal of the Indian Residential Schools was to “terminate the Treaties; and through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada.” This unsupported claim was not written as a hypothesis to be tested, but as a fact to be unquestioningly accepted.
The Report describes what happened in the residential schools as “cultural genocide,” a term that later morphed into actual “genocide.” But such a claim is rubbish. if there was a desire to wipe out Indigenous people as a distinct group, we wondered why the government signed treaties, set up reserves, published dictionaries in Indigenous languages, and never forbade Indigenous people from speaking their language in residential schools or anywhere else.
In 2021, six years after the TRC Report was completed, the Frontier Centre published the 1st edition of our book, From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. Coincidentally, the recently-released 2nd edition, with a new chapter and a conclusion that reflects Canada in 2024, was published just one day after former Justice Sinclair passed away.
Having looked carefully at the information the Commission gathered over the period of six years, we certainly appreciate the considerable work that went into that collection. Our book’s dedication quotes Murray Sinclair: “[The TRC] will provide Canadians with a permanent record that weaves all experiences, all perspectives into a fabric of truth. [Those] with the courage to step forward honour all of us. We are grateful.”
But the Report has flaws. For one thing, it fails to make clear that only about one-third of Indigenous children of school age attended an Indian Residential School during its 113-year history, many of them for only a few years. It also fails to distinguish between IRS students who, because of circumstances, remained in their school for very long periods and those who went home to their families on holidays and even weekends. Given repeated claims that the suffering IRS students experienced resulted largely from being separated from their families, why did the Commission not address this critical issue?
The Report also fails to examine closely the different experiences of IRS students enrolled in schools managed by quite different Christian Churches. Did the administrators and staff who were of the Roman Catholic, Anglican (Church of England), United (including Methodist and Presbyterian), Mennonite and Baptist faiths have identical approaches to the boarding school education of Indigenous children? Were some more strict, even harsh, in their treatment of students than others? Were some more respectful of Indigenous culture and beliefs?
We also have to wonder why Sinclair publicly expressed a belief that as many as 25,000 IRS students might have died while enrolled when the Commission reported fewer than 4,000. We wonder why the Report included a solitary claim of a student’s murder, made by Doris Young, a relative of Murray Sinclair.
Questions like these are examined in our book’s 50-page summary of the TRC Report, compiled with no government funding and no desire to mislead Canadians.
Sadly, Murray Sinclair did not live to see what the TRC called “reconciliation” occur. But our book builds squarely on the work that he and the TRC carried out. May he rest in peace, and may his colleagues and friends continue to build on the most enlightened parts of his legacy.
Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. During the summer of 1966 he was a student intern at the Siksika First Nation Agency Office, and he lived in Old Sun, the Anglican Residential School. During the 1966-67 school year, he was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence in Inuvik. Mark DeWolf, a former but non-Indigenous IRS student for nearly six years, is a retired educator living in Halifax. The 2nd edition of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, can be ordered from Amazon.ca; or direct from Frontier Centre at info@fcpp.org.
