Canada’s Nice Guy Image Has Been Irrevocably Shattered.

The discovery of unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous people has shed new light on the country’s ugly past. And things may get much worse.

Canada by Redd via Unsplash

In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s magnum opus — Uncle Tom’s cabin — we meet Eliza Harris, who, in order to escape the doomed fate of being a slave in America, was wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy, which led to her travelling to Canada, where she could live as a free woman, with her son.

Malcolm X, in response to those who said that living in northern states was better than residing in the former confederate south, said so long as you aren’t living in the north of the American border, you are still catching hell.

When contrasted to the United States of America’s health care system, which is fully privatized, in the hands of a number of profoundly corrupt insurance companies, Canada’s compares quite favourably, with treatment for Insulin, being affordable for patients with diabetes and so on.

Not also forgetting when Donald Trump was elected as American president back in 2016, the numbers of those wanting to leave to take residency at their neighbours rose exponentially.

Such was the image of Canada, as the non-slave trading, benign, if less accomplished sibling of the United States of America.

And yet, we have seen the carefully constructed image of Canada unravel spectacularly in the last few days, with the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous people.

Over a hundred years ago, 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly taken away from their families, in a bid to integrate and assimilate them into Canadian society. It is also estimated that as many as 15,000 children between 1876–1976 died.

But what we did not know or fully appreciate was the degree to which the state had gone to cover up the almighty mess that it had made of the lives of several generations of indigenous students, who had great difficulty adjusting to their new lives. Among the bodies found, thus far, have been those of children as young as three years of age.

This recent discovery has led to calls by the indigenous groups for more searches to be conducted at the grounds of the schools that numbers of…