Dead-End Streets & Empty Graves: Faking The Past

The problem with history is that you can attach your name to passing fads— say, Ukraine flag emojis— and be considered one of the cool kids. For a while. But eventually truth catches up with you. (Just ask Joe Biden.) And if you cannot defend your attachment to banning Dundas Street or calling Canada genocidal you will eventually find yourself on the wrong side of history, mocked, disparaged and rightfully ignored by future generations.

If you are Stalin or Mao in such a bind you simply shoot everyone who points out your gross inaccuracies. But if you live in a less blood-soaked tyranny, you’d better be prepared to face your critics.

Which brings us to the virtuous folks at Toronto City Hall who want to remove the name of Scotsman Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, from the 23-kilometre stretch from Mississauga to Scarborough that bears his name. In the same rush of blood to the head that saw radicals change the name of Ryerson University to the Anodyne School of Nothingness, these crack researchers decided Dundas was an active proponent of slavery in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.

The proposal they’ve presented to Toronto City Council would cost (their estimate) $8.1 M to remove his name from the endless street. This at a time when the Gardiner Expressway is set to collapse. And city parks are filled with drug addicts and mental health patients. And getting a building permit is only slightly less difficult than the Egyptians creating the pyramids. Priorities!

But we digress. The cost to every person, business or church located on that span or to those doing business with, sending a parcel to or planning a transit trip on Dundas dwarfs that estimate. But Wokeness must be served. Dundas had tried to prevent the anti-slavery forces in England from banning the practice universal in the world at the time. Smart guys say so.

Now—saints preserve us— three former Toronto mayors beg to disagree. They’ve actually read the history of Dundas that the civil servants misrepresented, and they want new lefty mayor Olivia Chow to stop the Dundas Street purge. Turns out Dundas was a LEADER in ending slavery in the British empire, after all. Oops.

For media slappies— you know who you are— who embraced the demise of Dundas much as they embraced the defrocking of Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Brant and Sir John A. this creates whiplash. How to stay onside with the real history after going balls-deep on the slavery devil narrative?

The easy answer is to— look at that shiny object— refer to the handy list of other street names still to be banned by city hall. Yonge Street. Wellesley Street. Simcoe Street. Even Baby Point Road. Go hard on them. Sure, you’ll run out of tyrants and racists eventually, but by then everyone will have forgotten how you libelled Dundas and Sir John A.

A similar rethink is also underway in regards to the “Mass graves/ Genocidal Canada” story promoted by PMJT. You remember? Skippy clutching a teddy bear in a Kamloops cemetery that was rumoured to contain the graves of children who met a bad end in the care of the Church or residential school? Then cancelling Canada Day and leaving flags at half mast for months. And telling the UN that Canada is genocidal, because x-rays showed what could have been dead babies underground. Or just rocks.

Forget that no parent of a Rez school child had ever reported a child missing or alleged murder or exorcism, the PM cast his lot with the murder meme. In several cases Trudeau was told by chiefs that the locals knew precisely who was buried in those graves. Cowessess First Nation band member Irene Andreas . “There is no ‘discovery’ of graves.  We buried our dead with a proper funeral. Then we allowed them to Rest In Peace…To assume that foul play took place would be premature and unsupported… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”

Trudeau was unrepentant. It was Teddy bear or bust. As we wrote in June, the narrative was furthered by the absence of any exhumed graves. Critics— labelled as deniers— were forced to disprove the story. Former Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller described as “ghouls” those who pointed out that residential school indigenous children died of the diseases of the day. As a few brave souls discovered, crossing Miller was a ticket to non-person status.

Until now. Turns out that Brandon University excavators examined a site under a Manitoba church identified as problematic by x-ray. The ground search cited 57 abnormalities. Their finding? Nope. Just rocks.

Which should be good news. Except if, like Trudeau’s chum Miller, you’re invested in Justin’s Genocidal narrative. Then it’s very bad. Pine Creek nation chief Derek Nepinak took great pains in announcing the discovery to stress, like Yosemite Sam, that I-don’t-know-how-they-done-it, but-I-know-they-done- it.

Nepinak’s preamble: “As a community we were preparing for more than one possible outcome, which meant we would prepare for the worst but hope for the best.” This suggested no remains was a positive. .

Guess again. “The results of our excavation under the church should not be deemed as conclusive of other ongoing searches and efforts to identify reflections from other community processes including other (ground-penetrating radar) initiatives… “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”

No kidding Except the very limited excavations done so far have revealed none of the alleged murdered children so desperately conjured up by the Trudeau media and the radicals in the Indigenous community. Barring forensic evidence we are left with stories from elders and the lurid tales at the reconciliation committee.

That standard may be fine for the Indigenous community, but in the outside world those journalists who described scenes of horror and Canada’s role in it should disappear for a while. Fat chance. That would include David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer writing in the Globe and Mail, claiming “The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools…looks and smells like criminal activity.”

Activist firebrand Robert Jago said anyone questioning the validity of his own genocide allegations should be considered equivalent to “Holocaust denial” and punished as a hate-speech purveyor. And then there’s Trudeau cabinet hacks like Miller echoing The Boss.

So don’t expect a reckoning. There are truths, and then there are truths. As former CRTC vice chair Peter Menzies observed: “The one thing this process has made abundantly clear is that the interests of anyone outside their club are irrelevant to all inside it.”

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx