Leah Gazan is a Manitoba NDP MP in the House of Commons.
A few days ago, she tabled a bill in the House of Commons which intends to criminalize certain speeches about Native American residential schools.
I quote The Canadian Press: it is a “bill aimed at criminalizing the act of endorsing, denying, minimizing or justifying the system of residential schools for Aboriginal people in Canada, as well as that of distorting the facts their subject.
Censure
Those who contravene this law could face 2 years in prison.
This bill is stupid. It is part of a logic of censorship which intends to impose a fixed interpretation of history, without taking into account the still contested nature of the facts, I will come back to this in a moment, without taking into account the fact that the concepts used to characterize historical events are not self-evident, I come back to that too.
Should we remember, for example, that we were first told, in the summer of 2021, about mass graves of Native American children? This was obviously false.
The historian Jacques Rouillard had the courage to point out that abandoned graves were not the equivalent of mass graves. This could land him in prison.
Use of the term cultural genocide, and even less genocide quite simply, does not seem self-evident to me. This could land me in prison.
Use of the term negationist, first used to talk about Holocaust deniers, is odious in this context. There are limits to twisting words from their meaning.
Prison
Let us be clear: I am, like everyone else, distressed by the history of residential schools. This is a tragedy in our history.
But the debate surrounding them must take place in public life, not in court.
NDP MP Leah Gazan is an enemy of freedom.
