Senator Lynn Beyak- The Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a Heretic -Parts 1, 2 and 3

                                 Part 1 -Describing the Situation as at October 1 s t, 2019

It’s trite and true that some good came from residential schools.

Indigenous playwright Tomson Highway said:   “you may have heard 7000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission- “TRC”) witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that are positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”

Cecil King, a former student of the residential school at Spanish, Ontario, who went on to become a University Professor, said:   “You never get to hear the good things that happen in these places. I do not think that I could achieve anywhere near what I have been able to achieve without the resolve I learned in the residential school.”

Peter Johnson, former Chief of the Serpent River First Nation, who also attended the Spanish residential school, said :   “The residential school was the best thing that could have happened to me because that is where I met my wife of 45 years. The schooling I received there taught me independence.”

Basil Johnston, author of  Indian School Days , his chronicle of his experiences at the Spanish residential school, said: “In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational system?” I respond with a qualified yes.”

Harold Cardinal, author of Indigenous rights book,  The Unjust Society , said: “Much can be said about the inherent good intentions of the missionaries, and it is true that without their efforts the educational level of our people might be lower than it is today.”

Honorary Chief of the Inuvik Dene Band, Cece Hodgson-Mc Cauley, said:   “They say it is about time they stop the negative side and start reporting the good side of the residential school jackpot… I can swear on the Bible that my time in the convent was good…Our mother died when I was six and my brother John, was two-and- a-half. Dad had no choice but to put us on the last steamboat, The Hudson Bay Company’s stern-wheeler. It was fall time and Dad was a trapper. We went upriver to Fort Providence to the Catholic convent (residential school). I spent 10 years there, going home every summer for the holidays on the mission boat.”

Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, of Espanola, Ontario, was a personal friend of Basil Johnston.  They played football against each other. They went to Loyola College in Montreal together. His reflections on residential schools:  “The notion that pupils at residential schools were torn from happy homes is a myth. There may have been some of which I am unaware but in my experience a significant amount of children were rescued from starving on trap lines, many of whom were afflicted with TB (tuberculosis). In fact Spanish had a special floor to care for those. It is true that English was paramount, but how else to equip the students to function off a particular reserve? It is strange that native spokesmen are reluctant to tout any success by them in the modern world…I suppose the silence reflects the motives of vocal elements and misguided followers.”

The above is representative of the multi-faceted, “good and bad” truth of residential schools.

But Canada’s political, academic, media and Indigenous elites have rejected this nuanced, multi-faceted truth.

Instead, in the manner of jealous, self-serving and insecure high priests of some cult, they have adopted a rigid, negative, devoid-of-any  good, black and white orthodoxy, which brooks neither opposition nor qualification, an  orthodoxy decreed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as follows:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and , through a process of elimination, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”…Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And,  most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people Canada did all these things. (“the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy”)

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a heavily mixed Indigenous-non-Indigenous part of Northern Ontario, from life experience, education and common sense, like the mainly Indigenous persons quoted above, knows that the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy is false. And she dared say so publicly, and so brought the high priests of this orthodoxy down on her head. They metaphorically branded her with the Scarlet letter “R”, for “racist”, and suspended her from their Senate community with a command to take training to learn the Error of Her Ways as a condition of being allowed back in.

In early 2017 she wrote, echoing the opinion of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that Indigenous people should voluntarily give up their special, separate legal status and join the Canadian mainstream as legal equals. She also wrote that at least some good came out of residential schools. For making these defensible assertions, in careful and respectful terms- for challenging the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy- she was mocked by politicians from all parties as an ignorant, “hate speech”, racist rube and by most of the media as well, especially the high priests of the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy at media institutions like the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and the CBC. She was taken off the Senate Indigenous Affairs Committee and there were calls for her resignation from the Senate!

In January of 2018, after she allowed some overwhelmingly  non-racist  letters of support from citizens to be posted on her Senate website- support for both her opinions, but more importantly, for her courage in exercising her duty of and right to free speech on this important national issue- and after refusing to remove any of these letters from her Senate website, she was kicked out of the Conservative Caucus entirely. Then, without due process or debate she was suspended from the Senate without pay for the balance of the Parliamentary session, physically escorted from the Senate chamber, locked out of her office, and then ordered, Maoist-like, to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training”.  It all constituted a shameful example of the embarrassingly primitive state of our national discussion of this issue, and more importantly, it showed the continuing, shameful and disgraceful failure on the part of all of our elites to uphold the principles of freedom of speech and due process, crucial Enlightenment rights and values enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Interestingly, to the extent any of the citizens’ letters of support might have been “not nice”, rough or offensive, (the Senate said a total of only five out of over one hundred fell into these categories), if this were in Europe those letters would have been legally protected as valid expressions of free speech. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights:

  “…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb, such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected.”

Not so for the frail, hysterical, grim and prim Senators of Canada.

The Senate ordered Ms. Beyak to take an online course given by Indigenous Awareness Canada and entitled “201 Indigenous Certification”. The goal of the course was   “to build effective and positive relationships with Indigenous people”, focussing on   “racism towards Indigenous Peoples, Residential Schools, Chronology and Current Realities.”  She took and completed the course

and received a suitable-for-framing “Indigenous Awareness” Certificate from Indigenous Awareness Canada.

But that wasn’t enough for the Senate.

The Senate also retained the taxpayer-funded Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), operating out of an office on Front Street in Toronto, to provide Ms. Beyak with “cultural competency training” (“the training”). OFIFC is a Canadian taxpayer-funded organization “mandated to serve the needs of urban indigenous people by providing culturally appropriate services in urban communities…whose work is faithful to indigenous identity harmoniously inscribed within the four directions of the medicine wheel”, and with “everyday good living the foundation of OFIFC’s endeavours” (from their website).

(Their mandate being to serve the needs of urban indigenous people it is unclear what expertise they had to serve the needs of the Northern Ontario, small-town based, non-Indigenous Ms. Beyak.)

 There were three “training cycles”- cycles 1, 2 and 3. On May 16 t h OFIFC sent a full description of the curriculum and learning goals of each of cycles 1, 2 and 3 to Senator Beyak and Pierre Legault, the Senate Ethics Officer charged with the responsibility to ensure that she took and successfully completed all the mandated training.  Cycle 1 was definitely mandatory. There is some confusion as to whether Cycles 2 and 3 were mandatory. In any event, Senator Beyak agreed readily to take Cycles 2 and 3 “training.”

Senator Beyak took and successfully completed cycle 1 of the training on June 6 t h.

Ms. Terrelyn Fearn, “Training Director” of OFIFC, then undertook to Mr. Legault- and through him to the Senate of Canada- to honour the agreement and provide cycle 2 and 3 to Ms. Beyak prior to August 31, 2019.

The cycles 2 and 3 training was mutually arranged for August 26 and 27 at OFIFC’s Toronto office. In reliance Senator Beyak planned and paid for the costly return trip from Dryden to Toronto, involving a four hour drive from Dryden to Thunder Bay, a return Thunder Bay-Toronto flight and miscellaneous other travel expenses.

 On August 26 t h Senator Beyak arrived at the Friendship Centre in Toronto at 8:45 a.m. and signed in at 9 a.m. There was no one else present and no apparent training of others going on. And instead of being taken to the conference training room with others, as she had been for cycle 1 the previous June, she was taken to Ms. Fearn’s office where she was told that the cycles 2 and 3 training was not available to her!

No training whatsoever was given to her that day, except that she received a lecture about having “white privilege”, and she left the Friendship Centre “empty handed” in terms of training . OFIFC had refused to provide her the pre-agreed, cycles 2 and 3 training!

A wasted trip for Senator Beyak!

Senator Beyak wrote Mr. Legault very shortly after this, described the strange and unexpected events of August 26 t h, and asked for an explanation of OFIFC’s conduct.

Senator Beyak never heard back from Mr. Legault as to why OFIFC broke its undertaking to Senator Beyak and to the Senate of Canada to deliver to her the cycles 2 and 3 “cultural competency” training, knowing that she had travelled all the way from Dryden at her own expense to receive it. This all constitutes basic rudeness, and more importantly, bad faith, on the part of OFIFC.

Senator Beyak never received any apology or explanation from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault, the Senate or OFIFC for why OFIFC stood her up on August 26 t h.

Senator Beyak, despite repeated requests, has never received any explanation from any of Mr. Legault, OFIFC or the Senate as to why it was decided that training cycles 2 and 3 were “not available” to her.

Senator Beyak never received any offer of reimbursement of her wasted travel expenses from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault or the Senate.

She was left to twist and dangle in a state of complete uncertainty.

Now, after the happening of all these summer events, and in complete and unconscionable disregard of the facts, a fresh persecution campaign started against Senator Beyak.

In mid-September Liberal Senator Peter Harder emailed known Liberal-friendly Canadian Press columnist Joan Bryden, telling her, amongst other things, that “Senator Beyak has so far refused to follow through on the Senate’s recommendations for remedial measures.”

In her ensuing September 24 t h Canadian Press column Ms. Bryden obediently wrote that “Senator Beyak refused to take sensitivity training.”

So maliciously false!

The cold, hard propagators of the   TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy, including the immediately above, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Carolyn Bennett, Senator Murray Sinclair, the Senate generally, the pitchfork and torches-bearing media, and all those cowardly others who sinned by their silences or their

omissions when they should have protested the treatment of Senator Beyak, have all done a grave disservice to their country, to democracy’s most basic value of free speech, and more especially, to the long-term best interests of our Indigenous citizens, by their cultish, value-free and conscience-free treatment of Senator Beyak.

As the brill iant and distinguished Christian writer Marilynne Robinson aptly-to-the-situation wrote:

“In a democracy abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candour and disrupt thought.”

The great Polish intellectual Czeslaw Milosz, no stranger to ideological fanaticism and tyranny, wrote of the dependent, blindly obedient, near-schizophrenic “captive minds” of intellectuals and leaders living under tyranny, undergoing a constant struggle to hide their true thoughts on all public issues. This reality is present in Canada with respect to all matters Indigenous, including the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy.

But not so with the independent, heroic Senator Beyak, who exhibits a compassionate and enlightened free mind, and who personifies Mr. Milosz’ urgings to intellectuals and leaders to , “at times of great cultural catastrophe, an intellectual’s task is not to offer consolation, but to secure the foundations of humanity endangered by ideological lies, to find anew seeds of good sense, ethical norms with which to resist despondency.”   She had the insight and courage to break with the habit of unquestioning deference to Canada’s “great men” on our profound, national Indigenous issues, because on these issues, in this situation, these “great men and women” of politics, academia and the media have made a huge, grievous mistake.

In this regard the political philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

“Great men may make mistakes…Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and often possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help destroy it all.”

 

Senator Beyak is a heroine of democracy and the best public friend the vast majority of powerless, impoverished and marginalized Indigenous Canadians could ever have.

She deserves an apology, a formal retraction of the scarlet letter “R” she was branded with, to be replaced with a large, gold letter “H”, for “heroine”,  a

sincere and contrite apology for OFIFC’s inexplicable conduct, and a welcome back into the Senate.

October 1st, 2019

 

                                    Part 2- Describing the Situation as at February 20, 2020

On January 31 s t, 2020, after a shabby and biased investigation of the events partly described in Part 1, the Senate committee in charge of making recommendations to the Senate with respect to the issue of whether Senator Beyak had satisfied all the conditions of their previous discipline order against her, which committee was headed by a clearly conflict of interest-burdened  Murray Sinclair, whose Truth and Reconciliation Report had falsely decreed the “historical truth” of the “cultural genocide” caused by residential schools and the racism underlying the Indian Act, and the racism of Canadians past and present against Indigenous peoples generally, recommended that because in all   her training Senator Beyak had purportedly failed to learn this “historical truth”, that she should be further suspended and ordered to take further “cultural training”. They also ordered that unless she successfully completed this additional training, as judged  subjectively  by the committee, (i.e. by the conflicted Murray Sinclair), and shown that she had learned the error of her ways, then she might be suspended further!

The immediately below is my response to the committee’s Orwellian, free speech killing, mandatory brain-re-engineering decree by the conflicted Senator Sinclair-dominated committee’s “First Report” in this regard.

 

Response to First Report of Standing Committee of Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators dated January 31 s t, 2020 (the Report) -Peter Best, Lawyer, Sudbury

The writer assumes that the reader has read the Report.

At page 1 the committee states that “it was not clear to your committee if Senator Beyak had complied with all the conditions for her reinstatement to the Senate.”

Response

Senator Beyak had received training, as per the Senate’s original order, from Indigenous Awareness Canada, successfully completed it, and received an Indigenous Awareness Certificate in relation to it.

In his letter dated June 16 t h to the Senate the Senate Ethics Officer (the SEO), the expert to whom the supervision and assessment of this matter had been delegated, wrote that “…Senator Beyak has attended the training required by the Senate…and it was completed within the timeframe imposed.” (all italics added) There was no requirement that she complete the training “successfully ” in the minds of  the committee, as determined  after the fact , with “successfully” meaning, in effect, “according to the committee’s opinions on Indigenous matters”.  Justice can never be so subjective. And, in any event, there never was a definition of what “successfully” was to mean. Further in any event, the SEO clearly determined that Senator Beyak had completed the training. He did not say that she had done so “unsuccessfully”. He had in mind the Indigenous Awareness Certificate and the trainer’s lack of complaint about anything  after Senator Beyak completed the Cycle 1 training. The clear determination of the expert, the SEO, should be deferred to. The committee reaching out to him, well after the fact, for clarification of what he meant by “completed”, to which question of course, because he obviously wasn’t there, he could give no opinion re “successfully”, is not an indication of anything. That Senator Beyak did complete the training to a reasonable standard is supported by the fact that the training provider, who had given the Cycle 1 training,  agreed to give Senator Beyak further training , which appears to be discretionary, additional training, which Senator Beyak agreed to take, while seeming to be under no Senate-ordered compulsion to do so. She essentially volunteered to take this extra training. Why would the trainer agree to give Senator Beyak additional training, called Cycles 2 and 3 training, if she had already secretly  determined that she was “unwilling to learn”? (Nothing negative in this regard was ever indicated to Senator Beyak.)

 If, as the committee reports the trainer as saying, Senator Beyak had “failed to exhibit any willingness to learn”, then why did the trainer, by her conduct, give her a “pass” (as opposed to a “fail”) in relation to her Cycle 1 training? Why did she not mention the Indigenous Awareness Certificate?  Why did she agree  to give Senator Beyak the additional training scheduled for late August? If Senator Beyak was “unwilling to learn” then why did the trainer not report this  to the SEO in June, and then, after the August 26 t h events, immediately after that? Why did the trainer only opine on this alleged failure on Senator Beyak’s part in early October, weeks  after Senator Beyak wrote the SEO in late August and told him that she had been effectively and unexpectedly  stood up by the trainer on August 26 t h? Why did the trainer not immediately report the events of August 26 t h to the SEO? Why did the trainer unilaterally,  with no notice to either the SEO or to Senator Beyak , cancel the Cycles 2 and 3 training, when she had already passed her with respect to the Cycle 1 training, and when she had specifically undertaken  to provide this further training?

The committee says that it “does not seek to ascribe blame for the training that did not occur as anticipated.” With respect, that is being blind to the facts . It was the fault of the trainer and her unilateral actions that the training did not take place. (It is clear from Senator Beyak’s email to the SEO reporting on her being refused the training after she had come all the way to Toronto from

Dryden at her own expense to get it that it was her politely challenging the accusation from the trainer that Senator Beyak had “white privilege” that put the trainer’s nose out joint and contributed to the trainer cancelling the training. This was bad faith on the part of the trainer. Education should be a two-way street. A trainer should expect,  and welcome, hard questions, respectful challenges and respectful dialogue. That how all good teachers learn and get better.

The Five Letters.

The committee recommends “no further recommendation” in relation to this, therefor it will not be subject to comment herein, except to say that non-juridical wording like “moral obligation”, and “should have sent a strong signal” reflect intense subjectivity on part of the committee. Legal rights and responsibilities should be based only  on clear, objective, written language, otherwise the person who is the object of the proceeding never really knows what he/she is being accused of or what he/she is required to do to fulfill a disciplinary order. This is unfair and is a fundamental breach of due process.

Further Suspension

The committee recommends further suspension to, amongst for other reasons, afford Senator Beyak with the opportunity to gain further perspective on the obligations of senators to “defend the principles of the Constitution and to uphold the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Response

Senator Beyak has been tried, found guilty, and punished for allowing five letters to be posted on her Senate website that the SEO determined to be racist. She was suspended for it. She experienced a huge financial loss and public embarrassment for it. Surely that is punishment enough for that particular action/inaction on her part. The principle of deterrence has been well upheld in that regard. It would be a breach of the most fundamental principles of justice that Senator Beyak be punished a second time for the same act of misbehaviour.

And it appears that the committee is not recommending further suspension for the posting of these five letters. Rather, it appears that they are recommending further suspension because, according to the committee, “Senator Beyak appears to deny a historical truth and displays conduct that ignores its racist underpinning.”

What “historical truth” is that?

The “historical truth” that she is accused of denying is “the cultural oppression imposed by the Residential School System, and the discriminatory objectives of

the Indian Act’, and “the reality of racism towards Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

With respect, these are not “historical truths” that she is denying.

These are merely interpretations of history  that she partially disagrees with.

Senator Beyak said that the Indian Act in effect is racist and should be repealed. (So how can she be said to be ignoring the racist underpinning of the Act? She agrees that it has a racial underpinning. That’s why she advocates for its abolition!) She said that Indigenous peoples should be equal under the law. She said that Indigenous peoples are suffering because of the existence of such South-African-like things as reserves and status cards. Indigenous writers and spokesmen such as William Wuttunee, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, John Kim Bell, Calvin Helin, and many others, in varying degrees, said or indicated the same thing. This view was once the official policy of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . This is the view shared by millions of Canadians today.

Senator Beyak did not exhibit a trace of “racism” in her character by voicing these views. In fact her views were the views expressed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They are the opposite of racist.

But that is essentially what the committee is suggesting i.e. that Senator Beyak is a racist with racist views.

The committee recommends further training so that Senator Beyak may develop a “new understanding of Canada’s history” to better meet the (previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the committee’s original training recommendation, that would “guide her conduct in relation to Indigenous issues.” And she must complete this training “successfully”,  as to be judged by the committee , as a condition of “her continued presence in the Senate.”

With respect, the committee’s position in this regard constitutes nothing short of Orwellian thought control.

The committee is essentially saying that Senator Beyak, to stay in the Senate, must change her mind, must alter her inner thoughts  on this great matter of public interest to all Canadians.

She must learn to love and then outwardly praise Big Brother.

The committee is demanding that she undergo “training” such that she will change her opinions on a matter of great public interest. And if she doesn’t change her views and publicly announce that, then she will be suspended from the Senate, indefinitely, until she convinces the Senate than she has seen their light of orthodoxy.

They are indicating to her by their recommendations in this regard that she is not to have the right of free speech and freedom of thought and conscience on these Indigenous-related issues.

Her sincere and reasonable view, as a Senator with a duty to “represent minority interests”, in this case the interests of Indigenous Canadians, is that the Indian Act should be repealed and status cards eventually done away with. That is how she feels the situation of the Indigenous peoples in Canada would be bettered. Because the committee disagrees with this view of how she should carry out her duty in this regard, they threaten her with expulsion.

This is wrong.

The Senate, if it adopts the committee’s recommendation in this regard, would be dealing a severe blow to freedom of speech and thought in Canada.

It would be the Senate which would be in breach of the Charter of Rights and Values.

Apology

The original Senate recommendation in this regard was that Senator Beyak apologize “to the Senate” for her actions/inactions. No specific wording was prescribed. She apologized in writing to the Senate, saying that for allowing those five letters to be posted: “I apologize to all Senators”.

Now the committee is saying that this apology wasn’t good enough- that it was not in (the previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the original recommendation.

Now the committee says that what they meant was that Senator Beyak was not just to apologize to the Senators in the manner expressly ordered, but rather that she was to write an opus-like mea culpa, confessing all her ideological errors and “acknowledging the adverse effects her conduct had on Indigenous peoples” They also say that, contrary to the express wording of the order, she should have apologized to all Indigenous peoples, in addition to the Senate, and undertook to everyone to “take action in order to rectify the situation.” (No specifics as to what action she is to take.)

All the above is a shocking and illiberal case of “moving the goal line back” after the fact.

The committee is showing that it is demanding nothing short of the complete humiliation and ideological surrender of Senator Beyak as a condition of allowing her to remain in the Senate.

They are recommending subjective, ill-defined and almost impossible- to meet-conditions, thus setting up a classically Kafkaesque situation for Senator Beyak, which goes miles beyond the bounds of fairness or respect for legal process. And it shows incredible hostility and disrespect towards a Senator who merely respectfully failed to conform with a highly contentious and debatable orthodoxy regarding residential schools and the Indian Act.

By their conduct the committee is dealing a devastating blow to free speech in Canada.

By their conduct the committee is acting in a manner that will cripple the ability of Senators to respectfully advocate new ways of looking at and solving old problems.

Conflict of Interest

Senator Murray Sinclair is the author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which report is the main source of the orthodoxy- the “historical truth”- of residential schools. Senator Beyak has said that it is her   opinion that this is no “historical truth”. To her this is an overly simplistic orthodoxy, lacking in nuance, balance and complexity which she respectfully disagrees with. Senator Sinclair is one her judges in this matter. As a former judge, Senator Sinclair would agree with the statement that judges are to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Senator Sinclair has a personal interest in this. By sitting in judgment of Senator Beyak, who partially challenges his views, and recommending such harsh and unprecedented measures against her, Senator Sinclair is giving rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest. He should have recused himself from this matter. Accepting the committee’s recommendations when its key member has an apparent conflict of interest taints the committee’s actions and will taint the Senate’s decision in this regard. This will harm the reputation of the Senate as a body that abides by fundamental legal principles and values.

February 17th, 2020

                       Part 3- Describing the Situation as of March 23 t h, 2020

In the week after February 17 t h political “friends” of Senator Beyak convinced her, in a swarm-like manner, to apologize to the Senate along the lines of what Senator Murray Sinclair said after-the-fact that he would have expected as an apology. A form of cringing mea culpa-for-everything apology was drafted for her and she, a good woman with little penchant for hard-ball politics or for what it takes in the hothouse world of politics to publicly stand up for oneself, especially when not one other person  would bravely publicly support her, on February 26 t h, dutifully read the prepared apology. If the exculpatory facts outlined above in my Response  were made known to her aforesaid “friends” and to the Senate generally they were communicated tepidly and weakly, in a private manner, and dismissed by all as of no relevance. The myth that she had

“refused” the training would be the controlling narrative, and the facts be damned.

Accordingly her apology was heard, the reporting of it was generally sanctimonious and cruelly dismissive, and her cold and fundamentally indifferent colleagues were by and large generally unmoved and unwilling to buck Senator Sinclair’s implacable campaign to further kick Senator Beyak when she was already down, and when, as he well knew, she has indeed already fully complied, to the extent she was allowed to, with the Senate’s original disciplinary recommendations.

They suspended her again, this time for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, purportedly because she  “failed to complete the anti-racism training”  and so that “she can complete the prescribed training and take time to think about the harm she did to Indigenous   peoples by posting racist letters on her website”  and so that she can “understand the pain she caused by describing Indian residential schools in positive terms.”   (In fact saying that “some good” came from residential schools and that they were “well intentioned” is  not  describing them in “positive terms” and there was never any evidence of any “pain” suffered by anyone as the result of anything she had said.) Again, showing a cruel and heartless example of double jeopardy, she was suspended without pay or privileges. As a further condition they ordered her to take more “prescribed training.” At the end of her training the Senate-approved training centre must report back on “Beyak’s attendance and performance at the educational programs.” (All quotes from CBC Online News, February 27 t h, 2020)

Clearly, this “performance” requirement, to be judged solely by Senator Sinclair and his cowed colleagues, is a clear threat to Senator Beyak that unless she shows that she has had her brain and thoughts re-washed- re-wired- re-engineered- about what she originally said about residential schools ( again, said by many Indigenous graduates as evidenced in Part 1 above ) then she will likely not get back into the Senate. She must show that her mind is willingly captured by the orthodoxy that these schools were all genocidal, and she will have to publicly confess and profess that. She must be humiliated in full.

How cruel, indifferent and illiberal our Senate and our media has acted! What injustice can be done under the guise of lazy, unprincipled, sanctimonious righteousness!

March 23 r d, 2020.

“There is no crueller  tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.”- Montesquieu

   Senator Lynn Beyak- The Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a Heretic -Parts 1, 2 and 3

                                 Part 1 -Describing the Situation as at October 1 s t, 2019

It’s trite and true that some good came from residential schools.

Indigenous playwright Tomson Highway said:   “you may have heard 7000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission- “TRC”) witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that are positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”

Cecil King, a former student of the residential school at Spanish, Ontario, who went on to become a University Professor, said:   “You never get to hear the good things that happen in these places. I do not think that I could achieve anywhere near what I have been able to achieve without the resolve I learned in the residential school.”

Peter Johnson, former Chief of the Serpent River First Nation, who also attended the Spanish residential school, said :   “The residential school was the best thing that could have happened to me because that is where I met my wife of 45 years. The schooling I received there taught me independence.”

Basil Johnston, author of  Indian School Days , his chronicle of his experiences at the Spanish residential school, said: “In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational system?” I respond with a qualified yes.”

Harold Cardinal, author of Indigenous rights book,  The Unjust Society , said: “Much can be said about the inherent good intentions of the missionaries, and it is true that without their efforts the educational level of our people might be lower than it is today.”

Honorary Chief of the Inuvik Dene Band, Cece Hodgson-Mc Cauley, said:   “They say it is about time they stop the negative side and start reporting the good side of the residential school jackpot… I can swear on the Bible that my time in the convent was good…Our mother died when I was six and my brother John, was two-and- a-half. Dad had no choice but to put us on the last steamboat, The Hudson Bay Company’s stern-wheeler. It was fall time and Dad was a trapper. We went upriver to Fort Providence to the Catholic convent (residential school). I spent 10 years there, going home every summer for the holidays on the mission boat.”

Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, of Espanola, Ontario, was a personal friend of Basil Johnston.  They played football against each other. They went to Loyola College in Montreal together. His reflections on residential

schools:  “The notion that pupils at residential schools were torn from happy homes is a myth. There may have been some of which I am unaware but in my experience a significant amount of children were rescued from starving on trap lines, many of whom were afflicted with TB (tuberculosis). In fact Spanish had a special floor to care for those. It is true that English was paramount, but how else to equip the students to function off a particular reserve? It is strange that native spokesmen are reluctant to tout any success by them in the modern world…I suppose the silence reflects the motives of vocal elements and misguided followers.”

The above is representative of the multi-faceted, “good and bad” truth of residential schools.

But Canada’s political, academic, media and Indigenous elites have rejected this nuanced, multi-faceted truth.

Instead, in the manner of jealous, self-serving and insecure high priests of some cult, they have adopted a rigid, negative, devoid-of-any  good, black and white orthodoxy, which brooks neither opposition nor qualification, an  orthodoxy decreed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as follows:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and , through a process of elimination, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”…Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And,  most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people Canada did all these things. (“the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy”)

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a heavily mixed Indigenous-non-Indigenous part of Northern Ontario, from life experience, education and common sense, like the mainly Indigenous persons quoted above, knows that the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy is false. And she dared say so publicly, and so brought the high priests of this orthodoxy down on her head. They metaphorically branded her with the Scarlet letter “R”, for “racist”, and suspended her from their Senate community with a command to take training to learn the Error of Her Ways as a condition of being allowed back in.

In early 2017 she wrote, echoing the opinion of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that Indigenous people should voluntarily give up their special, separate legal status and join the Canadian mainstream as legal equals. She also wrote that at least some good came out of residential schools. For making

these defensible assertions, in careful and respectful terms- for challenging the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy- she was mocked by politicians from all parties as an ignorant, “hate speech”, racist rube and by most of the media as well, especially the high priests of the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy at media institutions like the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and the CBC. She was taken off the Senate Indigenous Affairs Committee and there were calls for her resignation from the Senate!

In January of 2018, after she allowed some overwhelmingly  non-racist  letters of support from citizens to be posted on her Senate website- support for both her opinions, but more importantly, for her courage in exercising her duty of and right to free speech on this important national issue- and after refusing to remove any of these letters from her Senate website, she was kicked out of the Conservative Caucus entirely. Then, without due process or debate she was suspended from the Senate without pay for the balance of the Parliamentary session, physically escorted from the Senate chamber, locked out of her office, and then ordered, Maoist-like, to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training”.  It all constituted a shameful example of the embarrassingly primitive state of our national discussion of this issue, and more importantly, it showed the continuing, shameful and disgraceful failure on the part of all of our elites to uphold the principles of freedom of speech and due process, crucial Enlightenment rights and values enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Interestingly, to the extent any of the citizens’ letters of support might have been “not nice”, rough or offensive, (the Senate said a total of only five out of over one hundred fell into these categories), if this were in Europe those letters would have been legally protected as valid expressions of free speech. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights:

  “…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb, such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected.”

Not so for the frail, hysterical, grim and prim Senators of Canada.

The Senate ordered Ms. Beyak to take an online course given by Indigenous Awareness Canada and entitled “201 Indigenous Certification”. The goal of the course was   “to build effective and positive relationships with Indigenous people”, focussing on   “racism towards Indigenous Peoples, Residential Schools, Chronology and Current Realities.”  She took and completed the course and received a suitable-for-framing “Indigenous Awareness” Certificate from Indigenous Awareness Canada.

But that wasn’t enough for the Senate.

The Senate also retained the taxpayer-funded Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), operating out of an office on Front Street in Toronto, to provide Ms. Beyak with “cultural competency training” (“the training”). OFIFC is a Canadian taxpayer-funded organization “mandated to serve the needs of urban indigenous people by providing culturally appropriate services in urban communities…whose work is faithful to indigenous identity harmoniously inscribed within the four directions of the medicine wheel”, and with “everyday good living the foundation of OFIFC’s endeavours” (from their website).

(Their mandate being to serve the needs of urban indigenous people it is unclear what expertise they had to serve the needs of the Northern Ontario, small-town based, non-Indigenous Ms. Beyak.)

 There were three “training cycles”- cycles 1, 2 and 3. On May 16 t h OFIFC sent a full description of the curriculum and learning goals of each of cycles 1, 2 and 3 to Senator Beyak and Pierre Legault, the Senate Ethics Officer charged with the responsibility to ensure that she took and successfully completed all the mandated training.  Cycle 1 was definitely mandatory. There is some confusion as to whether Cycles 2 and 3 were mandatory. In any event, Senator Beyak agreed readily to take Cycles 2 and 3 “training.”

Senator Beyak took and successfully completed cycle 1 of the training on June 6 t h.

Ms. Terrelyn Fearn, “Training Director” of OFIFC, then undertook to Mr. Legault- and through him to the Senate of Canada- to honour the agreement and provide cycle 2 and 3 to Ms. Beyak prior to August 31, 2019.

The cycles 2 and 3 training was mutually arranged for August 26 and 27 at OFIFC’s Toronto office. In reliance Senator Beyak planned and paid for the costly return trip from Dryden to Toronto, involving a four hour drive from Dryden to Thunder Bay, a return Thunder Bay-Toronto flight and miscellaneous other travel expenses.

 On August 26 t h Senator Beyak arrived at the Friendship Centre in Toronto at 8:45 a.m. and signed in at 9 a.m. There was no one else present and no apparent training of others going on. And instead of being taken to the conference training room with others, as she had been for cycle 1 the previous June, she was taken to Ms. Fearn’s office where she was told that the cycles 2 and 3 training was not available to her!

No training whatsoever was given to her that day, except that she received a lecture about having “white privilege”, and she left the Friendship Centre “empty handed” in terms of training . OFIFC had refused to provide her the pre-agreed, cycles 2 and 3 training!

A wasted trip for Senator Beyak!

Senator Beyak wrote Mr. Legault very shortly after this, described the strange and unexpected events of August 26 t h, and asked for an explanation of OFIFC’s conduct.

Senator Beyak never heard back from Mr. Legault as to why OFIFC broke its undertaking to Senator Beyak and to the Senate of Canada to deliver to her the cycles 2 and 3 “cultural competency” training, knowing that she had travelled all the way from Dryden at her own expense to receive it. This all constitutes basic rudeness, and more importantly, bad faith, on the part of OFIFC.

Senator Beyak never received any apology or explanation from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault, the Senate or OFIFC for why OFIFC stood her up on August 26 t h.

Senator Beyak, despite repeated requests, has never received any explanation from any of Mr. Legault, OFIFC or the Senate as to why it was decided that training cycles 2 and 3 were “not available” to her.

Senator Beyak never received any offer of reimbursement of her wasted travel expenses from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault or the Senate.

She was left to twist and dangle in a state of complete uncertainty.

Now, after the happening of all these summer events, and in complete and unconscionable disregard of the facts, a fresh persecution campaign started against Senator Beyak.

In mid-September Liberal Senator Peter Harder emailed known Liberal-friendly Canadian Press columnist Joan Bryden, telling her, amongst other things, that “Senator Beyak has so far refused to follow through on the Senate’s recommendations for remedial measures.”

In her ensuing September 24 t h Canadian Press column Ms. Bryden obediently wrote that “Senator Beyak refused to take sensitivity training.”

So maliciously false!

The cold, hard propagators of the   TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy, including the immediately above, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Carolyn Bennett, Senator Murray Sinclair, the Senate generally, the pitchfork and torches-bearing media, and all those cowardly others who sinned by their silences or their omissions when they should have protested the treatment of Senator Beyak, have all done a grave disservice to their country, to democracy’s most basic value of free speech, and more especially, to the long-term best interests of our Indigenous citizens, by their cultish, value-free and conscience-free treatment of Senator Beyak.

As the brill iant and distinguished Christian writer Marilynne Robinson aptly-to-the-situation wrote:

“In a democracy abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candour and disrupt thought.”

The great Polish intellectual Czeslaw Milosz, no stranger to ideological fanaticism and tyranny, wrote of the dependent, blindly obedient, near-schizophrenic “captive minds” of intellectuals and leaders living under tyranny, undergoing a constant struggle to hide their true thoughts on all public issues. This reality is present in Canada with respect to all matters Indigenous, including the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy.

But not so with the independent, heroic Senator Beyak, who exhibits a compassionate and enlightened free mind, and who personifies Mr. Milosz’ urgings to intellectuals and leaders to , “at times of great cultural catastrophe, an intellectual’s task is not to offer consolation, but to secure the foundations of humanity endangered by ideological lies, to find anew seeds of good sense, ethical norms with which to resist despondency.”   She had the insight and courage to break with the habit of unquestioning deference to Canada’s “great men” on our profound, national Indigenous issues, because on these issues, in this situation, these “great men and women” of politics, academia and the media have made a huge, grievous mistake.

In this regard the political philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

“Great men may make mistakes…Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and often possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help destroy it all.”

 

Senator Beyak is a heroine of democracy and the best public friend the vast majority of powerless, impoverished and marginalized Indigenous Canadians could ever have.

She deserves an apology, a formal retraction of the scarlet letter “R” she was branded with, to be replaced with a large, gold letter “H”, for “heroine”,  a sincere and contrite apology for OFIFC’s inexplicable conduct, and a welcome back into the Senate.

October 1st, 2019

 

                                    Part 2- Describing the Situation as at February 20, 2020

On January 31 s t, 2020, after a shabby and biased investigation of the events partly described in Part 1, the Senate committee in charge of making recommendations to the Senate with respect to the issue of whether Senator Beyak had satisfied all the conditions of their previous discipline order against her, which committee was headed by a clearly conflict of interest-burdened  Murray Sinclair, whose Truth and Reconciliation Report had falsely decreed the “historical truth” of the “cultural genocide” caused by residential schools and the racism underlying the Indian Act, and the racism of Canadians past and present against Indigenous peoples generally, recommended that because in all   her training Senator Beyak had purportedly failed to learn this “historical truth”, that she should be further suspended and ordered to take further “cultural training”. They also ordered that unless she successfully completed this additional training, as judged  subjectively  by the committee, (i.e. by the conflicted Murray Sinclair), and shown that she had learned the error of her ways, then she might be suspended further!

The immediately below is my response to the committee’s Orwellian, free speech killing, mandatory brain-re-engineering decree by the conflicted Senator Sinclair-dominated committee’s “First Report” in this regard.

 

Response to First Report of Standing Committee of Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators dated January 31 s t, 2020 (the Report) -Peter Best, Lawyer, Sudbury

The writer assumes that the reader has read the Report.

At page 1 the committee states that “it was not clear to your committee if Senator Beyak had complied with all the conditions for her reinstatement to the Senate.”

Response

Senator Beyak had received training, as per the Senate’s original order, from Indigenous Awareness Canada, successfully completed it, and received an Indigenous Awareness Certificate in relation to it.

In his letter dated June 16 t h to the Senate the Senate Ethics Officer (the SEO), the expert to whom the supervision and assessment of this matter had been delegated, wrote that “…Senator Beyak has attended the training required by the Senate…and it was completed within the timeframe imposed.” (all italics added) There was no requirement that she complete the training “successfully ” in the minds of  the committee, as determined  after the fact , with “successfully”

meaning, in effect, “according to the committee’s opinions on Indigenous matters”.  Justice can never be so subjective. And, in any event, there never was a definition of what “successfully” was to mean. Further in any event, the SEO clearly determined that Senator Beyak had completed the training. He did not say that she had done so “unsuccessfully”. He had in mind the Indigenous Awareness Certificate and the trainer’s lack of complaint about anything  after Senator Beyak completed the Cycle 1 training. The clear determination of the expert, the SEO, should be deferred to. The committee reaching out to him, well after the fact, for clarification of what he meant by “completed”, to which question of course, because he obviously wasn’t there, he could give no opinion re “successfully”, is not an indication of anything. That Senator Beyak did complete the training to a reasonable standard is supported by the fact that the training provider, who had given the Cycle 1 training,  agreed to give Senator Beyak further training , which appears to be discretionary, additional training, which Senator Beyak agreed to take, while seeming to be under no Senate-ordered compulsion to do so. She essentially volunteered to take this extra training. Why would the trainer agree to give Senator Beyak additional training, called Cycles 2 and 3 training, if she had already secretly  determined that she was “unwilling to learn”? (Nothing negative in this regard was ever indicated to Senator Beyak.)

 If, as the committee reports the trainer as saying, Senator Beyak had “failed to exhibit any willingness to learn”, then why did the trainer, by her conduct, give her a “pass” (as opposed to a “fail”) in relation to her Cycle 1 training? Why did she not mention the Indigenous Awareness Certificate?  Why did she agree  to give Senator Beyak the additional training scheduled for late August? If Senator Beyak was “unwilling to learn” then why did the trainer not report this  to the SEO in June, and then, after the August 26 t h events, immediately after that? Why did the trainer only opine on this alleged failure on Senator Beyak’s part in early October, weeks  after Senator Beyak wrote the SEO in late August and told him that she had been effectively and unexpectedly  stood up by the trainer on August 26 t h? Why did the trainer not immediately report the events of August 26 t h to the SEO? Why did the trainer unilaterally,  with no notice to either the SEO or to Senator Beyak , cancel the Cycles 2 and 3 training, when she had already passed her with respect to the Cycle 1 training, and when she had specifically undertaken  to provide this further training?

The committee says that it “does not seek to ascribe blame for the training that did not occur as anticipated.” With respect, that is being blind to the facts . It was the fault of the trainer and her unilateral actions that the training did not take place. (It is clear from Senator Beyak’s email to the SEO reporting on her being refused the training after she had come all the way to Toronto from Dryden at her own expense to get it that it was her politely challenging the accusation from the trainer that Senator Beyak had “white privilege” that put the trainer’s nose out joint and contributed to the trainer cancelling the training. This was bad faith on the part of the trainer. Education should be a two-way street. A trainer should expect,  and welcome, hard questions, respectful

challenges and respectful dialogue. That how all good teachers learn and get better.

The Five Letters.

The committee recommends “no further recommendation” in relation to this, therefor it will not be subject to comment herein, except to say that non-juridical wording like “moral obligation”, and “should have sent a strong signal” reflect intense subjectivity on part of the committee. Legal rights and responsibilities should be based only  on clear, objective, written language, otherwise the person who is the object of the proceeding never really knows what he/she is being accused of or what he/she is required to do to fulfill a disciplinary order. This is unfair and is a fundamental breach of due process.

Further Suspension

The committee recommends further suspension to, amongst for other reasons, afford Senator Beyak with the opportunity to gain further perspective on the obligations of senators to “defend the principles of the Constitution and to uphold the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Response

Senator Beyak has been tried, found guilty, and punished for allowing five letters to be posted on her Senate website that the SEO determined to be racist. She was suspended for it. She experienced a huge financial loss and public embarrassment for it. Surely that is punishment enough for that particular action/inaction on her part. The principle of deterrence has been well upheld in that regard. It would be a breach of the most fundamental principles of justice that Senator Beyak be punished a second time for the same act of misbehaviour.

And it appears that the committee is not recommending further suspension for the posting of these five letters. Rather, it appears that they are recommending further suspension because, according to the committee, “Senator Beyak appears to deny a historical truth and displays conduct that ignores its racist underpinning.”

What “historical truth” is that?

The “historical truth” that she is accused of denying is “the cultural oppression imposed by the Residential School System, and the discriminatory objectives of the Indian Act’, and “the reality of racism towards Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

With respect, these are not “historical truths” that she is denying.

These are merely interpretations of history  that she partially disagrees with.

Senator Beyak said that the Indian Act in effect is racist and should be repealed. (So how can she be said to be ignoring the racist underpinning of the Act? She agrees that it has a racial underpinning. That’s why she advocates for its abolition!) She said that Indigenous peoples should be equal under the law. She said that Indigenous peoples are suffering because of the existence of such South-African-like things as reserves and status cards. Indigenous writers and spokesmen such as William Wuttunee, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, John Kim Bell, Calvin Helin, and many others, in varying degrees, said or indicated the same thing. This view was once the official policy of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . This is the view shared by millions of Canadians today.

Senator Beyak did not exhibit a trace of “racism” in her character by voicing these views. In fact her views were the views expressed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They are the opposite of racist.

But that is essentially what the committee is suggesting i.e. that Senator Beyak is a racist with racist views.

The committee recommends further training so that Senator Beyak may develop a “new understanding of Canada’s history” to better meet the (previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the committee’s original training recommendation, that would “guide her conduct in relation to Indigenous issues.” And she must complete this training “successfully”,  as to be judged by the committee , as a condition of “her continued presence in the Senate.”

With respect, the committee’s position in this regard constitutes nothing short of Orwellian thought control.

The committee is essentially saying that Senator Beyak, to stay in the Senate, must change her mind, must alter her inner thoughts  on this great matter of public interest to all Canadians.

She must learn to love and then outwardly praise Big Brother.

The committee is demanding that she undergo “training” such that she will change her opinions on a matter of great public interest. And if she doesn’t change her views and publicly announce that, then she will be suspended from the Senate, indefinitely, until she convinces the Senate than she has seen their light of orthodoxy.

They are indicating to her by their recommendations in this regard that she is not to have the right of free speech and freedom of thought and conscience on these Indigenous-related issues.

Her sincere and reasonable view, as a Senator with a duty to “represent minority interests”, in this case the interests of Indigenous Canadians, is that the Indian Act should be repealed and status cards eventually done away with. That is how she feels the situation of the Indigenous peoples in Canada would be bettered. Because the committee disagrees with this view of how she should carry out her duty in this regard, they threaten her with expulsion.

This is wrong.

The Senate, if it adopts the committee’s recommendation in this regard, would be dealing a severe blow to freedom of speech and thought in Canada.

It would be the Senate which would be in breach of the Charter of Rights and Values.

Apology

The original Senate recommendation in this regard was that Senator Beyak apologize “to the Senate” for her actions/inactions. No specific wording was prescribed. She apologized in writing to the Senate, saying that for allowing those five letters to be posted: “I apologize to all Senators”.

Now the committee is saying that this apology wasn’t good enough- that it was not in (the previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the original recommendation.

Now the committee says that what they meant was that Senator Beyak was not just to apologize to the Senators in the manner expressly ordered, but rather that she was to write an opus-like mea culpa, confessing all her ideological errors and “acknowledging the adverse effects her conduct had on Indigenous peoples” They also say that, contrary to the express wording of the order, she should have apologized to all Indigenous peoples, in addition to the Senate, and undertook to everyone to “take action in order to rectify the situation.” (No specifics as to what action she is to take.)

All the above is a shocking and illiberal case of “moving the goal line back” after the fact.

The committee is showing that it is demanding nothing short of the complete humiliation and ideological surrender of Senator Beyak as a condition of allowing her to remain in the Senate.

They are recommending subjective, ill-defined and almost impossible- to meet-conditions, thus setting up a classically Kafkaesque situation for Senator Beyak, which goes miles beyond the bounds of fairness or respect for legal process. And it shows incredible hostility and disrespect towards a Senator who merely

respectfully failed to conform with a highly contentious and debatable orthodoxy regarding residential schools and the Indian Act.

By their conduct the committee is dealing a devastating blow to free speech in Canada.

By their conduct the committee is acting in a manner that will cripple the ability of Senators to respectfully advocate new ways of looking at and solving old problems.

Conflict of Interest

Senator Murray Sinclair is the author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which report is the main source of the orthodoxy- the “historical truth”- of residential schools. Senator Beyak has said that it is her   opinion that this is no “historical truth”. To her this is an overly simplistic orthodoxy, lacking in nuance, balance and complexity which she respectfully disagrees with. Senator Sinclair is one her judges in this matter. As a former judge, Senator Sinclair would agree with the statement that judges are to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Senator Sinclair has a personal interest in this. By sitting in judgment of Senator Beyak, who partially challenges his views, and recommending such harsh and unprecedented measures against her, Senator Sinclair is giving rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest. He should have recused himself from this matter. Accepting the committee’s recommendations when its key member has an apparent conflict of interest taints the committee’s actions and will taint the Senate’s decision in this regard. This will harm the reputation of the Senate as a body that abides by fundamental legal principles and values.

February 17th, 2020

                       Part 3- Describing the Situation as of March 23 t h, 2020

In the week after February 17 t h political “friends” of Senator Beyak convinced her, in a swarm-like manner, to apologize to the Senate along the lines of what Senator Murray Sinclair said after-the-fact that he would have expected as an apology. A form of cringing mea culpa-for-everything apology was drafted for her and she, a good woman with little penchant for hard-ball politics or for what it takes in the hothouse world of politics to publicly stand up for oneself, especially when not one other person  would bravely publicly support her, on February 26 t h, dutifully read the prepared apology. If the exculpatory facts outlined above in my Response  were made known to her aforesaid “friends” and to the Senate generally they were communicated tepidly and weakly, in a private manner, and dismissed by all as of no relevance. The myth that she had “refused” the training would be the controlling narrative, and the facts be damned.

Accordingly her apology was heard, the reporting of it was generally sanctimonious and cruelly dismissive, and her cold and fundamentally indifferent colleagues were by and large generally unmoved and unwilling to buck Senator Sinclair’s implacable campaign to further kick Senator Beyak when she was already down, and when, as he well knew, she has indeed already fully complied, to the extent she was allowed to, with the Senate’s original disciplinary recommendations.

They suspended her again, this time for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, purportedly because she  “failed to complete the anti-racism training”  and so that “she can complete the prescribed training and take time to think about the harm she did to Indigenous   peoples by posting racist letters on her website”  and so that she can “understand the pain she caused by describing Indian residential schools in positive terms.”   (In fact saying that “some good” came from residential schools and that they were “well intentioned” is  not  describing them in “positive terms” and there was never any evidence of any “pain” suffered by anyone as the result of anything she had said.) Again, showing a cruel and heartless example of double jeopardy, she was suspended without pay or privileges. As a further condition they ordered her to take more “prescribed training.” At the end of her training the Senate-approved training centre must report back on “Beyak’s attendance and performance at the educational programs.” (All quotes from CBC Online News, February 27 t h, 2020)

Clearly, this “performance” requirement, to be judged solely by Senator Sinclair and his cowed colleagues, is a clear threat to Senator Beyak that unless she shows that she has had her brain and thoughts re-washed- re-wired- re-engineered- about what she originally said about residential schools ( again, said by many Indigenous graduates as evidenced in Part 1 above ) then she will likely not get back into the Senate. She must show that her mind is willingly captured by the orthodoxy that these schools were all genocidal, and she will have to publicly confess and profess that. She must be humiliated in full.

How cruel, indifferent and illiberal our Senate and our media has acted! What injustice can be done under the guise of lazy, unprincipled, sanctimonious righteousness!

March 23 r d, 2020.

“There is no crueller  tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.”- Montesquieu

   Senator Lynn Beyak- The Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a Heretic -Parts 1, 2 and 3

                                 Part 1 -Describing the Situation as at October 1 s t, 2019

It’s trite and true that some good came from residential schools.

Indigenous playwright Tomson Highway said:   “you may have heard 7000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission- “TRC”) witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that are positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”

Cecil King, a former student of the residential school at Spanish, Ontario, who went on to become a University Professor, said:   “You never get to hear the good things that happen in these places. I do not think that I could achieve anywhere near what I have been able to achieve without the resolve I learned in the residential school.”

Peter Johnson, former Chief of the Serpent River First Nation, who also attended the Spanish residential school, said :   “The residential school was the best thing that could have happened to me because that is where I met my wife of 45 years. The schooling I received there taught me independence.”

Basil Johnston, author of  Indian School Days , his chronicle of his experiences at the Spanish residential school, said: “In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational system?” I respond with a qualified yes.”

Harold Cardinal, author of Indigenous rights book,  The Unjust Society , said: “Much can be said about the inherent good intentions of the missionaries, and it is true that without their efforts the educational level of our people might be lower than it is today.”

Honorary Chief of the Inuvik Dene Band, Cece Hodgson-Mc Cauley, said:   “They say it is about time they stop the negative side and start reporting the good side of the residential school jackpot… I can swear on the Bible that my time in the convent was good…Our mother died when I was six and my brother John, was two-and- a-half. Dad had no choice but to put us on the last steamboat, The Hudson Bay Company’s stern-wheeler. It was fall time and Dad was a trapper. We went upriver to Fort Providence to the Catholic convent (residential school). I spent 10 years there, going home every summer for the holidays on the mission boat.”

Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, of Espanola, Ontario, was a personal friend of Basil Johnston.  They played football against each other. They went to Loyola College in Montreal together. His reflections on residential schools:  “The notion that pupils at residential schools were torn from happy homes is a myth. There may have been some of which I am unaware but in my experience a significant amount of children were rescued from starving on trap lines, many of whom were afflicted with TB (tuberculosis). In fact Spanish had a special floor to care for those. It is true that English was paramount, but how

else to equip the students to function off a particular reserve? It is strange that native spokesmen are reluctant to tout any success by them in the modern world…I suppose the silence reflects the motives of vocal elements and misguided followers.”

The above is representative of the multi-faceted, “good and bad” truth of residential schools.

But Canada’s political, academic, media and Indigenous elites have rejected this nuanced, multi-faceted truth.

Instead, in the manner of jealous, self-serving and insecure high priests of some cult, they have adopted a rigid, negative, devoid-of-any  good, black and white orthodoxy, which brooks neither opposition nor qualification, an  orthodoxy decreed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as follows:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and , through a process of elimination, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”…Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And,  most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people Canada did all these things. (“the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy”)

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a heavily mixed Indigenous-non-Indigenous part of Northern Ontario, from life experience, education and common sense, like the mainly Indigenous persons quoted above, knows that the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy is false. And she dared say so publicly, and so brought the high priests of this orthodoxy down on her head. They metaphorically branded her with the Scarlet letter “R”, for “racist”, and suspended her from their Senate community with a command to take training to learn the Error of Her Ways as a condition of being allowed back in.

In early 2017 she wrote, echoing the opinion of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that Indigenous people should voluntarily give up their special, separate legal status and join the Canadian mainstream as legal equals. She also wrote that at least some good came out of residential schools. For making these defensible assertions, in careful and respectful terms- for challenging the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy- she was mocked by politicians from all parties as an ignorant, “hate speech”, racist rube and by most of the media as well, especially the high priests of the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy at media institutions like the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and the CBC. She was taken off

the Senate Indigenous Affairs Committee and there were calls for her resignation from the Senate!

In January of 2018, after she allowed some overwhelmingly  non-racist  letters of support from citizens to be posted on her Senate website- support for both her opinions, but more importantly, for her courage in exercising her duty of and right to free speech on this important national issue- and after refusing to remove any of these letters from her Senate website, she was kicked out of the Conservative Caucus entirely. Then, without due process or debate she was suspended from the Senate without pay for the balance of the Parliamentary session, physically escorted from the Senate chamber, locked out of her office, and then ordered, Maoist-like, to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training”.  It all constituted a shameful example of the embarrassingly primitive state of our national discussion of this issue, and more importantly, it showed the continuing, shameful and disgraceful failure on the part of all of our elites to uphold the principles of freedom of speech and due process, crucial Enlightenment rights and values enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Interestingly, to the extent any of the citizens’ letters of support might have been “not nice”, rough or offensive, (the Senate said a total of only five out of over one hundred fell into these categories), if this were in Europe those letters would have been legally protected as valid expressions of free speech. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights:

  “…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb, such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected.”

Not so for the frail, hysterical, grim and prim Senators of Canada.

The Senate ordered Ms. Beyak to take an online course given by Indigenous Awareness Canada and entitled “201 Indigenous Certification”. The goal of the course was   “to build effective and positive relationships with Indigenous people”, focussing on   “racism towards Indigenous Peoples, Residential Schools, Chronology and Current Realities.”  She took and completed the course and received a suitable-for-framing “Indigenous Awareness” Certificate from Indigenous Awareness Canada.

But that wasn’t enough for the Senate.

The Senate also retained the taxpayer-funded Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), operating out of an office on Front Street in Toronto, to provide Ms. Beyak with “cultural competency training” (“the

training”). OFIFC is a Canadian taxpayer-funded organization “mandated to serve the needs of urban indigenous people by providing culturally appropriate services in urban communities…whose work is faithful to indigenous identity harmoniously inscribed within the four directions of the medicine wheel”, and with “everyday good living the foundation of OFIFC’s endeavours” (from their website).

(Their mandate being to serve the needs of urban indigenous people it is unclear what expertise they had to serve the needs of the Northern Ontario, small-town based, non-Indigenous Ms. Beyak.)

 There were three “training cycles”- cycles 1, 2 and 3. On May 16 t h OFIFC sent a full description of the curriculum and learning goals of each of cycles 1, 2 and 3 to Senator Beyak and Pierre Legault, the Senate Ethics Officer charged with the responsibility to ensure that she took and successfully completed all the mandated training.  Cycle 1 was definitely mandatory. There is some confusion as to whether Cycles 2 and 3 were mandatory. In any event, Senator Beyak agreed readily to take Cycles 2 and 3 “training.”

Senator Beyak took and successfully completed cycle 1 of the training on June 6 t h.

Ms. Terrelyn Fearn, “Training Director” of OFIFC, then undertook to Mr. Legault- and through him to the Senate of Canada- to honour the agreement and provide cycle 2 and 3 to Ms. Beyak prior to August 31, 2019.

The cycles 2 and 3 training was mutually arranged for August 26 and 27 at OFIFC’s Toronto office. In reliance Senator Beyak planned and paid for the costly return trip from Dryden to Toronto, involving a four hour drive from Dryden to Thunder Bay, a return Thunder Bay-Toronto flight and miscellaneous other travel expenses.

 On August 26 t h Senator Beyak arrived at the Friendship Centre in Toronto at 8:45 a.m. and signed in at 9 a.m. There was no one else present and no apparent training of others going on. And instead of being taken to the conference training room with others, as she had been for cycle 1 the previous June, she was taken to Ms. Fearn’s office where she was told that the cycles 2 and 3 training was not available to her!

No training whatsoever was given to her that day, except that she received a lecture about having “white privilege”, and she left the Friendship Centre “empty handed” in terms of training . OFIFC had refused to provide her the pre-agreed, cycles 2 and 3 training!

A wasted trip for Senator Beyak!

Senator Beyak wrote Mr. Legault very shortly after this, described the strange and unexpected events of August 26 t h, and asked for an explanation of OFIFC’s conduct.

Senator Beyak never heard back from Mr. Legault as to why OFIFC broke its undertaking to Senator Beyak and to the Senate of Canada to deliver to her the cycles 2 and 3 “cultural competency” training, knowing that she had travelled all the way from Dryden at her own expense to receive it. This all constitutes basic rudeness, and more importantly, bad faith, on the part of OFIFC.

Senator Beyak never received any apology or explanation from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault, the Senate or OFIFC for why OFIFC stood her up on August 26 t h.

Senator Beyak, despite repeated requests, has never received any explanation from any of Mr. Legault, OFIFC or the Senate as to why it was decided that training cycles 2 and 3 were “not available” to her.

Senator Beyak never received any offer of reimbursement of her wasted travel expenses from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault or the Senate.

She was left to twist and dangle in a state of complete uncertainty.

Now, after the happening of all these summer events, and in complete and unconscionable disregard of the facts, a fresh persecution campaign started against Senator Beyak.

In mid-September Liberal Senator Peter Harder emailed known Liberal-friendly Canadian Press columnist Joan Bryden, telling her, amongst other things, that “Senator Beyak has so far refused to follow through on the Senate’s recommendations for remedial measures.”

In her ensuing September 24 t h Canadian Press column Ms. Bryden obediently wrote that “Senator Beyak refused to take sensitivity training.”

So maliciously false!

The cold, hard propagators of the   TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy, including the immediately above, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Carolyn Bennett, Senator Murray Sinclair, the Senate generally, the pitchfork and torches-bearing media, and all those cowardly others who sinned by their silences or their omissions when they should have protested the treatment of Senator Beyak, have all done a grave disservice to their country, to democracy’s most basic value of free speech, and more especially, to the long-term best interests of our Indigenous citizens, by their cultish, value-free and conscience-free treatment of Senator Beyak.

As the brill iant and distinguished Christian writer Marilynne Robinson aptly-to-the-situation wrote:

“In a democracy abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candour and disrupt thought.”

The great Polish intellectual Czeslaw Milosz, no stranger to ideological fanaticism and tyranny, wrote of the dependent, blindly obedient, near-schizophrenic “captive minds” of intellectuals and leaders living under tyranny, undergoing a constant struggle to hide their true thoughts on all public issues. This reality is present in Canada with respect to all matters Indigenous, including the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy.

But not so with the independent, heroic Senator Beyak, who exhibits a compassionate and enlightened free mind, and who personifies Mr. Milosz’ urgings to intellectuals and leaders to , “at times of great cultural catastrophe, an intellectual’s task is not to offer consolation, but to secure the foundations of humanity endangered by ideological lies, to find anew seeds of good sense, ethical norms with which to resist despondency.”   She had the insight and courage to break with the habit of unquestioning deference to Canada’s “great men” on our profound, national Indigenous issues, because on these issues, in this situation, these “great men and women” of politics, academia and the media have made a huge, grievous mistake.

In this regard the political philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

“Great men may make mistakes…Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and often possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help destroy it all.”

 

Senator Beyak is a heroine of democracy and the best public friend the vast majority of powerless, impoverished and marginalized Indigenous Canadians could ever have.

She deserves an apology, a formal retraction of the scarlet letter “R” she was branded with, to be replaced with a large, gold letter “H”, for “heroine”,  a sincere and contrite apology for OFIFC’s inexplicable conduct, and a welcome back into the Senate.

October 1st, 2019

 

                                    Part 2- Describing the Situation as at February 20, 2020

On January 31 s t, 2020, after a shabby and biased investigation of the events partly described in Part 1, the Senate committee in charge of making recommendations to the Senate with respect to the issue of whether Senator Beyak had satisfied all the conditions of their previous discipline order against her, which committee was headed by a clearly conflict of interest-burdened  Murray Sinclair, whose Truth and Reconciliation Report had falsely decreed the “historical truth” of the “cultural genocide” caused by residential schools and the racism underlying the Indian Act, and the racism of Canadians past and present against Indigenous peoples generally, recommended that because in all   her training Senator Beyak had purportedly failed to learn this “historical truth”, that she should be further suspended and ordered to take further “cultural training”. They also ordered that unless she successfully completed this additional training, as judged  subjectively  by the committee, (i.e. by the conflicted Murray Sinclair), and shown that she had learned the error of her ways, then she might be suspended further!

The immediately below is my response to the committee’s Orwellian, free speech killing, mandatory brain-re-engineering decree by the conflicted Senator Sinclair-dominated committee’s “First Report” in this regard.

 

Response to First Report of Standing Committee of Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators dated January 31 s t, 2020 (the Report) -Peter Best, Lawyer, Sudbury

The writer assumes that the reader has read the Report.

At page 1 the committee states that “it was not clear to your committee if Senator Beyak had complied with all the conditions for her reinstatement to the Senate.”

Response

Senator Beyak had received training, as per the Senate’s original order, from Indigenous Awareness Canada, successfully completed it, and received an Indigenous Awareness Certificate in relation to it.

In his letter dated June 16 t h to the Senate the Senate Ethics Officer (the SEO), the expert to whom the supervision and assessment of this matter had been delegated, wrote that “…Senator Beyak has attended the training required by the Senate…and it was completed within the timeframe imposed.” (all italics added) There was no requirement that she complete the training “successfully ” in the minds of  the committee, as determined  after the fact , with “successfully”

meaning, in effect, “according to the committee’s opinions on Indigenous matters”.  Justice can never be so subjective. And, in any event, there never was a definition of what “successfully” was to mean. Further in any event, the SEO clearly determined that Senator Beyak had completed the training. He did not say that she had done so “unsuccessfully”. He had in mind the Indigenous Awareness Certificate and the trainer’s lack of complaint about anything  after Senator Beyak completed the Cycle 1 training. The clear determination of the expert, the SEO, should be deferred to. The committee reaching out to him, well after the fact, for clarification of what he meant by “completed”, to which question of course, because he obviously wasn’t there, he could give no opinion re “successfully”, is not an indication of anything. That Senator Beyak did complete the training to a reasonable standard is supported by the fact that the training provider, who had given the Cycle 1 training,  agreed to give Senator Beyak further training , which appears to be discretionary, additional training, which Senator Beyak agreed to take, while seeming to be under no Senate-ordered compulsion to do so. She essentially volunteered to take this extra training. Why would the trainer agree to give Senator Beyak additional training, called Cycles 2 and 3 training, if she had already secretly  determined that she was “unwilling to learn”? (Nothing negative in this regard was ever indicated to Senator Beyak.)

 If, as the committee reports the trainer as saying, Senator Beyak had “failed to exhibit any willingness to learn”, then why did the trainer, by her conduct, give her a “pass” (as opposed to a “fail”) in relation to her Cycle 1 training? Why did she not mention the Indigenous Awareness Certificate?  Why did she agree  to give Senator Beyak the additional training scheduled for late August? If Senator Beyak was “unwilling to learn” then why did the trainer not report this  to the SEO in June, and then, after the August 26 t h events, immediately after that? Why did the trainer only opine on this alleged failure on Senator Beyak’s part in early October, weeks  after Senator Beyak wrote the SEO in late August and told him that she had been effectively and unexpectedly  stood up by the trainer on August 26 t h? Why did the trainer not immediately report the events of August 26 t h to the SEO? Why did the trainer unilaterally,  with no notice to either the SEO or to Senator Beyak , cancel the Cycles 2 and 3 training, when she had already passed her with respect to the Cycle 1 training, and when she had specifically undertaken  to provide this further training?

The committee says that it “does not seek to ascribe blame for the training that did not occur as anticipated.” With respect, that is being blind to the facts . It was the fault of the trainer and her unilateral actions that the training did not take place. (It is clear from Senator Beyak’s email to the SEO reporting on her being refused the training after she had come all the way to Toronto from Dryden at her own expense to get it that it was her politely challenging the accusation from the trainer that Senator Beyak had “white privilege” that put the trainer’s nose out joint and contributed to the trainer cancelling the training. This was bad faith on the part of the trainer. Education should be a two-way street. A trainer should expect,  and welcome, hard questions, respectful

challenges and respectful dialogue. That how all good teachers learn and get better.

The Five Letters.

The committee recommends “no further recommendation” in relation to this, therefor it will not be subject to comment herein, except to say that non-juridical wording like “moral obligation”, and “should have sent a strong signal” reflect intense subjectivity on part of the committee. Legal rights and responsibilities should be based only  on clear, objective, written language, otherwise the person who is the object of the proceeding never really knows what he/she is being accused of or what he/she is required to do to fulfill a disciplinary order. This is unfair and is a fundamental breach of due process.

Further Suspension

The committee recommends further suspension to, amongst for other reasons, afford Senator Beyak with the opportunity to gain further perspective on the obligations of senators to “defend the principles of the Constitution and to uphold the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Response

Senator Beyak has been tried, found guilty, and punished for allowing five letters to be posted on her Senate website that the SEO determined to be racist. She was suspended for it. She experienced a huge financial loss and public embarrassment for it. Surely that is punishment enough for that particular action/inaction on her part. The principle of deterrence has been well upheld in that regard. It would be a breach of the most fundamental principles of justice that Senator Beyak be punished a second time for the same act of misbehaviour.

And it appears that the committee is not recommending further suspension for the posting of these five letters. Rather, it appears that they are recommending further suspension because, according to the committee, “Senator Beyak appears to deny a historical truth and displays conduct that ignores its racist underpinning.”

What “historical truth” is that?

The “historical truth” that she is accused of denying is “the cultural oppression imposed by the Residential School System, and the discriminatory objectives of the Indian Act’, and “the reality of racism towards Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

With respect, these are not “historical truths” that she is denying.

These are merely interpretations of history  that she partially disagrees with.

Senator Beyak said that the Indian Act in effect is racist and should be repealed. (So how can she be said to be ignoring the racist underpinning of the Act? She agrees that it has a racial underpinning. That’s why she advocates for its abolition!) She said that Indigenous peoples should be equal under the law. She said that Indigenous peoples are suffering because of the existence of such South-African-like things as reserves and status cards. Indigenous writers and spokesmen such as William Wuttunee, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, John Kim Bell, Calvin Helin, and many others, in varying degrees, said or indicated the same thing. This view was once the official policy of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . This is the view shared by millions of Canadians today.

Senator Beyak did not exhibit a trace of “racism” in her character by voicing these views. In fact her views were the views expressed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They are the opposite of racist.

But that is essentially what the committee is suggesting i.e. that Senator Beyak is a racist with racist views.

The committee recommends further training so that Senator Beyak may develop a “new understanding of Canada’s history” to better meet the (previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the committee’s original training recommendation, that would “guide her conduct in relation to Indigenous issues.” And she must complete this training “successfully”,  as to be judged by the committee , as a condition of “her continued presence in the Senate.”

With respect, the committee’s position in this regard constitutes nothing short of Orwellian thought control.

The committee is essentially saying that Senator Beyak, to stay in the Senate, must change her mind, must alter her inner thoughts  on this great matter of public interest to all Canadians.

She must learn to love and then outwardly praise Big Brother.

The committee is demanding that she undergo “training” such that she will change her opinions on a matter of great public interest. And if she doesn’t change her views and publicly announce that, then she will be suspended from the Senate, indefinitely, until she convinces the Senate than she has seen their light of orthodoxy.

They are indicating to her by their recommendations in this regard that she is not to have the right of free speech and freedom of thought and conscience on these Indigenous-related issues.

Her sincere and reasonable view, as a Senator with a duty to “represent minority interests”, in this case the interests of Indigenous Canadians, is that the Indian Act should be repealed and status cards eventually done away with. That is how she feels the situation of the Indigenous peoples in Canada would be bettered. Because the committee disagrees with this view of how she should carry out her duty in this regard, they threaten her with expulsion.

This is wrong.

The Senate, if it adopts the committee’s recommendation in this regard, would be dealing a severe blow to freedom of speech and thought in Canada.

It would be the Senate which would be in breach of the Charter of Rights and Values.

Apology

The original Senate recommendation in this regard was that Senator Beyak apologize “to the Senate” for her actions/inactions. No specific wording was prescribed. She apologized in writing to the Senate, saying that for allowing those five letters to be posted: “I apologize to all Senators”.

Now the committee is saying that this apology wasn’t good enough- that it was not in (the previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the original recommendation.

Now the committee says that what they meant was that Senator Beyak was not just to apologize to the Senators in the manner expressly ordered, but rather that she was to write an opus-like mea culpa, confessing all her ideological errors and “acknowledging the adverse effects her conduct had on Indigenous peoples” They also say that, contrary to the express wording of the order, she should have apologized to all Indigenous peoples, in addition to the Senate, and undertook to everyone to “take action in order to rectify the situation.” (No specifics as to what action she is to take.)

All the above is a shocking and illiberal case of “moving the goal line back” after the fact.

The committee is showing that it is demanding nothing short of the complete humiliation and ideological surrender of Senator Beyak as a condition of allowing her to remain in the Senate.

They are recommending subjective, ill-defined and almost impossible- to meet-conditions, thus setting up a classically Kafkaesque situation for Senator Beyak, which goes miles beyond the bounds of fairness or respect for legal process. And it shows incredible hostility and disrespect towards a Senator who merely

respectfully failed to conform with a highly contentious and debatable orthodoxy regarding residential schools and the Indian Act.

By their conduct the committee is dealing a devastating blow to free speech in Canada.

By their conduct the committee is acting in a manner that will cripple the ability of Senators to respectfully advocate new ways of looking at and solving old problems.

Conflict of Interest

Senator Murray Sinclair is the author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which report is the main source of the orthodoxy- the “historical truth”- of residential schools. Senator Beyak has said that it is her   opinion that this is no “historical truth”. To her this is an overly simplistic orthodoxy, lacking in nuance, balance and complexity which she respectfully disagrees with. Senator Sinclair is one her judges in this matter. As a former judge, Senator Sinclair would agree with the statement that judges are to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Senator Sinclair has a personal interest in this. By sitting in judgment of Senator Beyak, who partially challenges his views, and recommending such harsh and unprecedented measures against her, Senator Sinclair is giving rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest. He should have recused himself from this matter. Accepting the committee’s recommendations when its key member has an apparent conflict of interest taints the committee’s actions and will taint the Senate’s decision in this regard. This will harm the reputation of the Senate as a body that abides by fundamental legal principles and values.

February 17th, 2020

                       Part 3- Describing the Situation as of March 23 t h, 2020

In the week after February 17 t h political “friends” of Senator Beyak convinced her, in a swarm-like manner, to apologize to the Senate along the lines of what Senator Murray Sinclair said after-the-fact that he would have expected as an apology. A form of cringing mea culpa-for-everything apology was drafted for her and she, a good woman with little penchant for hard-ball politics or for what it takes in the hothouse world of politics to publicly stand up for oneself, especially when not one other person  would bravely publicly support her, on February 26 t h, dutifully read the prepared apology. If the exculpatory facts outlined above in my Response  were made known to her aforesaid “friends” and to the Senate generally they were communicated tepidly and weakly, in a private manner, and dismissed by all as of no relevance. The myth that she had “refused” the training would be the controlling narrative, and the facts be damned.

Accordingly her apology was heard, the reporting of it was generally sanctimonious and cruelly dismissive, and her cold and fundamentally indifferent colleagues were by and large generally unmoved and unwilling to buck Senator Sinclair’s implacable campaign to further kick Senator Beyak when she was already down, and when, as he well knew, she has indeed already fully complied, to the extent she was allowed to, with the Senate’s original disciplinary recommendations.

They suspended her again, this time for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, purportedly because she  “failed to complete the anti-racism training”  and so that “she can complete the prescribed training and take time to think about the harm she did to Indigenous   peoples by posting racist letters on her website”  and so that she can “understand the pain she caused by describing Indian residential schools in positive terms.”   (In fact saying that “some good” came from residential schools and that they were “well intentioned” is  not  describing them in “positive terms” and there was never any evidence of any “pain” suffered by anyone as the result of anything she had said.) Again, showing a cruel and heartless example of double jeopardy, she was suspended without pay or privileges. As a further condition they ordered her to take more “prescribed training.” At the end of her training the Senate-approved training centre must report back on “Beyak’s attendance and performance at the educational programs.” (All quotes from CBC Online News, February 27 t h, 2020)

Clearly, this “performance” requirement, to be judged solely by Senator Sinclair and his cowed colleagues, is a clear threat to Senator Beyak that unless she shows that she has had her brain and thoughts re-washed- re-wired- re-engineered- about what she originally said about residential schools ( again, said by many Indigenous graduates as evidenced in Part 1 above ) then she will likely not get back into the Senate. She must show that her mind is willingly captured by the orthodoxy that these schools were all genocidal, and she will have to publicly confess and profess that. She must be humiliated in full.

How cruel, indifferent and illiberal our Senate and our media has acted! What injustice can be done under the guise of lazy, unprincipled, sanctimonious righteousness!

March 23 r d, 2020.

“There is no crueller  tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.”- Montesquieu

   Senator Lynn Beyak- The Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a Heretic -Parts 1, 2 and 3

                                 Part 1 -Describing the Situation as at October 1 s t, 2019

It’s trite and true that some good came from residential schools.

Indigenous playwright Tomson Highway said:   “you may have heard 7000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission- “TRC”) witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that are positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”

Cecil King, a former student of the residential school at Spanish, Ontario, who went on to become a University Professor, said:   “You never get to hear the good things that happen in these places. I do not think that I could achieve anywhere near what I have been able to achieve without the resolve I learned in the residential school.”

Peter Johnson, former Chief of the Serpent River First Nation, who also attended the Spanish residential school, said :   “The residential school was the best thing that could have happened to me because that is where I met my wife of 45 years. The schooling I received there taught me independence.”

Basil Johnston, author of  Indian School Days , his chronicle of his experiences at the Spanish residential school, said: “In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational system?” I respond with a qualified yes.”

Harold Cardinal, author of Indigenous rights book,  The Unjust Society , said: “Much can be said about the inherent good intentions of the missionaries, and it is true that without their efforts the educational level of our people might be lower than it is today.”

Honorary Chief of the Inuvik Dene Band, Cece Hodgson-Mc Cauley, said:   “They say it is about time they stop the negative side and start reporting the good side of the residential school jackpot… I can swear on the Bible that my time in the convent was good…Our mother died when I was six and my brother John, was two-and- a-half. Dad had no choice but to put us on the last steamboat, The Hudson Bay Company’s stern-wheeler. It was fall time and Dad was a trapper. We went upriver to Fort Providence to the Catholic convent (residential school). I spent 10 years there, going home every summer for the holidays on the mission boat.”

Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, of Espanola, Ontario, was a personal friend of Basil Johnston.  They played football against each other. They went to Loyola College in Montreal together. His reflections on residential schools:  “The notion that pupils at residential schools were torn from happy homes is a myth. There may have been some of which I am unaware but in my experience a significant amount of children were rescued from starving on trap lines, many of whom were afflicted with TB (tuberculosis). In fact Spanish had a special floor to care for those. It is true that English was paramount, but how

else to equip the students to function off a particular reserve? It is strange that native spokesmen are reluctant to tout any success by them in the modern world…I suppose the silence reflects the motives of vocal elements and misguided followers.”

The above is representative of the multi-faceted, “good and bad” truth of residential schools.

But Canada’s political, academic, media and Indigenous elites have rejected this nuanced, multi-faceted truth.

Instead, in the manner of jealous, self-serving and insecure high priests of some cult, they have adopted a rigid, negative, devoid-of-any  good, black and white orthodoxy, which brooks neither opposition nor qualification, an  orthodoxy decreed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as follows:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and , through a process of elimination, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”…Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And,  most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people Canada did all these things. (“the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy”)

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a heavily mixed Indigenous-non-Indigenous part of Northern Ontario, from life experience, education and common sense, like the mainly Indigenous persons quoted above, knows that the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy is false. And she dared say so publicly, and so brought the high priests of this orthodoxy down on her head. They metaphorically branded her with the Scarlet letter “R”, for “racist”, and suspended her from their Senate community with a command to take training to learn the Error of Her Ways as a condition of being allowed back in.

In early 2017 she wrote, echoing the opinion of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that Indigenous people should voluntarily give up their special, separate legal status and join the Canadian mainstream as legal equals. She also wrote that at least some good came out of residential schools. For making these defensible assertions, in careful and respectful terms- for challenging the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy- she was mocked by politicians from all parties as an ignorant, “hate speech”, racist rube and by most of the media as well, especially the high priests of the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy at media institutions like the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and the CBC. She was taken off

the Senate Indigenous Affairs Committee and there were calls for her resignation from the Senate!

In January of 2018, after she allowed some overwhelmingly  non-racist  letters of support from citizens to be posted on her Senate website- support for both her opinions, but more importantly, for her courage in exercising her duty of and right to free speech on this important national issue- and after refusing to remove any of these letters from her Senate website, she was kicked out of the Conservative Caucus entirely. Then, without due process or debate she was suspended from the Senate without pay for the balance of the Parliamentary session, physically escorted from the Senate chamber, locked out of her office, and then ordered, Maoist-like, to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training”.  It all constituted a shameful example of the embarrassingly primitive state of our national discussion of this issue, and more importantly, it showed the continuing, shameful and disgraceful failure on the part of all of our elites to uphold the principles of freedom of speech and due process, crucial Enlightenment rights and values enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Interestingly, to the extent any of the citizens’ letters of support might have been “not nice”, rough or offensive, (the Senate said a total of only five out of over one hundred fell into these categories), if this were in Europe those letters would have been legally protected as valid expressions of free speech. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights:

  “…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb, such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected.”

Not so for the frail, hysterical, grim and prim Senators of Canada.

The Senate ordered Ms. Beyak to take an online course given by Indigenous Awareness Canada and entitled “201 Indigenous Certification”. The goal of the course was   “to build effective and positive relationships with Indigenous people”, focussing on   “racism towards Indigenous Peoples, Residential Schools, Chronology and Current Realities.”  She took and completed the course and received a suitable-for-framing “Indigenous Awareness” Certificate from Indigenous Awareness Canada.

But that wasn’t enough for the Senate.

The Senate also retained the taxpayer-funded Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), operating out of an office on Front Street in Toronto, to provide Ms. Beyak with “cultural competency training” (“the

training”). OFIFC is a Canadian taxpayer-funded organization “mandated to serve the needs of urban indigenous people by providing culturally appropriate services in urban communities…whose work is faithful to indigenous identity harmoniously inscribed within the four directions of the medicine wheel”, and with “everyday good living the foundation of OFIFC’s endeavours” (from their website).

(Their mandate being to serve the needs of urban indigenous people it is unclear what expertise they had to serve the needs of the Northern Ontario, small-town based, non-Indigenous Ms. Beyak.)

 There were three “training cycles”- cycles 1, 2 and 3. On May 16 t h OFIFC sent a full description of the curriculum and learning goals of each of cycles 1, 2 and 3 to Senator Beyak and Pierre Legault, the Senate Ethics Officer charged with the responsibility to ensure that she took and successfully completed all the mandated training.  Cycle 1 was definitely mandatory. There is some confusion as to whether Cycles 2 and 3 were mandatory. In any event, Senator Beyak agreed readily to take Cycles 2 and 3 “training.”

Senator Beyak took and successfully completed cycle 1 of the training on June 6 t h.

Ms. Terrelyn Fearn, “Training Director” of OFIFC, then undertook to Mr. Legault- and through him to the Senate of Canada- to honour the agreement and provide cycle 2 and 3 to Ms. Beyak prior to August 31, 2019.

The cycles 2 and 3 training was mutually arranged for August 26 and 27 at OFIFC’s Toronto office. In reliance Senator Beyak planned and paid for the costly return trip from Dryden to Toronto, involving a four hour drive from Dryden to Thunder Bay, a return Thunder Bay-Toronto flight and miscellaneous other travel expenses.

 On August 26 t h Senator Beyak arrived at the Friendship Centre in Toronto at 8:45 a.m. and signed in at 9 a.m. There was no one else present and no apparent training of others going on. And instead of being taken to the conference training room with others, as she had been for cycle 1 the previous June, she was taken to Ms. Fearn’s office where she was told that the cycles 2 and 3 training was not available to her!

No training whatsoever was given to her that day, except that she received a lecture about having “white privilege”, and she left the Friendship Centre “empty handed” in terms of training . OFIFC had refused to provide her the pre-agreed, cycles 2 and 3 training!

A wasted trip for Senator Beyak!

Senator Beyak wrote Mr. Legault very shortly after this, described the strange and unexpected events of August 26 t h, and asked for an explanation of OFIFC’s conduct.

Senator Beyak never heard back from Mr. Legault as to why OFIFC broke its undertaking to Senator Beyak and to the Senate of Canada to deliver to her the cycles 2 and 3 “cultural competency” training, knowing that she had travelled all the way from Dryden at her own expense to receive it. This all constitutes basic rudeness, and more importantly, bad faith, on the part of OFIFC.

Senator Beyak never received any apology or explanation from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault, the Senate or OFIFC for why OFIFC stood her up on August 26 t h.

Senator Beyak, despite repeated requests, has never received any explanation from any of Mr. Legault, OFIFC or the Senate as to why it was decided that training cycles 2 and 3 were “not available” to her.

Senator Beyak never received any offer of reimbursement of her wasted travel expenses from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault or the Senate.

She was left to twist and dangle in a state of complete uncertainty.

Now, after the happening of all these summer events, and in complete and unconscionable disregard of the facts, a fresh persecution campaign started against Senator Beyak.

In mid-September Liberal Senator Peter Harder emailed known Liberal-friendly Canadian Press columnist Joan Bryden, telling her, amongst other things, that “Senator Beyak has so far refused to follow through on the Senate’s recommendations for remedial measures.”

In her ensuing September 24 t h Canadian Press column Ms. Bryden obediently wrote that “Senator Beyak refused to take sensitivity training.”

So maliciously false!

The cold, hard propagators of the   TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy, including the immediately above, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Carolyn Bennett, Senator Murray Sinclair, the Senate generally, the pitchfork and torches-bearing media, and all those cowardly others who sinned by their silences or their omissions when they should have protested the treatment of Senator Beyak, have all done a grave disservice to their country, to democracy’s most basic value of free speech, and more especially, to the long-term best interests of our Indigenous citizens, by their cultish, value-free and conscience-free treatment of Senator Beyak.

As the brill iant and distinguished Christian writer Marilynne Robinson aptly-to-the-situation wrote:

“In a democracy abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candour and disrupt thought.”

The great Polish intellectual Czeslaw Milosz, no stranger to ideological fanaticism and tyranny, wrote of the dependent, blindly obedient, near-schizophrenic “captive minds” of intellectuals and leaders living under tyranny, undergoing a constant struggle to hide their true thoughts on all public issues. This reality is present in Canada with respect to all matters Indigenous, including the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy.

But not so with the independent, heroic Senator Beyak, who exhibits a compassionate and enlightened free mind, and who personifies Mr. Milosz’ urgings to intellectuals and leaders to , “at times of great cultural catastrophe, an intellectual’s task is not to offer consolation, but to secure the foundations of humanity endangered by ideological lies, to find anew seeds of good sense, ethical norms with which to resist despondency.”   She had the insight and courage to break with the habit of unquestioning deference to Canada’s “great men” on our profound, national Indigenous issues, because on these issues, in this situation, these “great men and women” of politics, academia and the media have made a huge, grievous mistake.

In this regard the political philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

“Great men may make mistakes…Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and often possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help destroy it all.”

 

Senator Beyak is a heroine of democracy and the best public friend the vast majority of powerless, impoverished and marginalized Indigenous Canadians could ever have.

She deserves an apology, a formal retraction of the scarlet letter “R” she was branded with, to be replaced with a large, gold letter “H”, for “heroine”,  a sincere and contrite apology for OFIFC’s inexplicable conduct, and a welcome back into the Senate.

October 1st, 2019

 

                                    Part 2- Describing the Situation as at February 20, 2020

On January 31 s t, 2020, after a shabby and biased investigation of the events partly described in Part 1, the Senate committee in charge of making recommendations to the Senate with respect to the issue of whether Senator Beyak had satisfied all the conditions of their previous discipline order against her, which committee was headed by a clearly conflict of interest-burdened  Murray Sinclair, whose Truth and Reconciliation Report had falsely decreed the “historical truth” of the “cultural genocide” caused by residential schools and the racism underlying the Indian Act, and the racism of Canadians past and present against Indigenous peoples generally, recommended that because in all   her training Senator Beyak had purportedly failed to learn this “historical truth”, that she should be further suspended and ordered to take further “cultural training”. They also ordered that unless she successfully completed this additional training, as judged  subjectively  by the committee, (i.e. by the conflicted Murray Sinclair), and shown that she had learned the error of her ways, then she might be suspended further!

The immediately below is my response to the committee’s Orwellian, free speech killing, mandatory brain-re-engineering decree by the conflicted Senator Sinclair-dominated committee’s “First Report” in this regard.

 

Response to First Report of Standing Committee of Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators dated January 31 s t, 2020 (the Report) -Peter Best, Lawyer, Sudbury

The writer assumes that the reader has read the Report.

At page 1 the committee states that “it was not clear to your committee if Senator Beyak had complied with all the conditions for her reinstatement to the Senate.”

Response

Senator Beyak had received training, as per the Senate’s original order, from Indigenous Awareness Canada, successfully completed it, and received an Indigenous Awareness Certificate in relation to it.

In his letter dated June 16 t h to the Senate the Senate Ethics Officer (the SEO), the expert to whom the supervision and assessment of this matter had been delegated, wrote that “…Senator Beyak has attended the training required by the Senate…and it was completed within the timeframe imposed.” (all italics added) There was no requirement that she complete the training “successfully ” in the minds of  the committee, as determined  after the fact , with “successfully”

meaning, in effect, “according to the committee’s opinions on Indigenous matters”.  Justice can never be so subjective. And, in any event, there never was a definition of what “successfully” was to mean. Further in any event, the SEO clearly determined that Senator Beyak had completed the training. He did not say that she had done so “unsuccessfully”. He had in mind the Indigenous Awareness Certificate and the trainer’s lack of complaint about anything  after Senator Beyak completed the Cycle 1 training. The clear determination of the expert, the SEO, should be deferred to. The committee reaching out to him, well after the fact, for clarification of what he meant by “completed”, to which question of course, because he obviously wasn’t there, he could give no opinion re “successfully”, is not an indication of anything. That Senator Beyak did complete the training to a reasonable standard is supported by the fact that the training provider, who had given the Cycle 1 training,  agreed to give Senator Beyak further training , which appears to be discretionary, additional training, which Senator Beyak agreed to take, while seeming to be under no Senate-ordered compulsion to do so. She essentially volunteered to take this extra training. Why would the trainer agree to give Senator Beyak additional training, called Cycles 2 and 3 training, if she had already secretly  determined that she was “unwilling to learn”? (Nothing negative in this regard was ever indicated to Senator Beyak.)

 If, as the committee reports the trainer as saying, Senator Beyak had “failed to exhibit any willingness to learn”, then why did the trainer, by her conduct, give her a “pass” (as opposed to a “fail”) in relation to her Cycle 1 training? Why did she not mention the Indigenous Awareness Certificate?  Why did she agree  to give Senator Beyak the additional training scheduled for late August? If Senator Beyak was “unwilling to learn” then why did the trainer not report this  to the SEO in June, and then, after the August 26 t h events, immediately after that? Why did the trainer only opine on this alleged failure on Senator Beyak’s part in early October, weeks  after Senator Beyak wrote the SEO in late August and told him that she had been effectively and unexpectedly  stood up by the trainer on August 26 t h? Why did the trainer not immediately report the events of August 26 t h to the SEO? Why did the trainer unilaterally,  with no notice to either the SEO or to Senator Beyak , cancel the Cycles 2 and 3 training, when she had already passed her with respect to the Cycle 1 training, and when she had specifically undertaken  to provide this further training?

The committee says that it “does not seek to ascribe blame for the training that did not occur as anticipated.” With respect, that is being blind to the facts . It was the fault of the trainer and her unilateral actions that the training did not take place. (It is clear from Senator Beyak’s email to the SEO reporting on her being refused the training after she had come all the way to Toronto from Dryden at her own expense to get it that it was her politely challenging the accusation from the trainer that Senator Beyak had “white privilege” that put the trainer’s nose out joint and contributed to the trainer cancelling the training. This was bad faith on the part of the trainer. Education should be a two-way street. A trainer should expect,  and welcome, hard questions, respectful

challenges and respectful dialogue. That how all good teachers learn and get better.

The Five Letters.

The committee recommends “no further recommendation” in relation to this, therefor it will not be subject to comment herein, except to say that non-juridical wording like “moral obligation”, and “should have sent a strong signal” reflect intense subjectivity on part of the committee. Legal rights and responsibilities should be based only  on clear, objective, written language, otherwise the person who is the object of the proceeding never really knows what he/she is being accused of or what he/she is required to do to fulfill a disciplinary order. This is unfair and is a fundamental breach of due process.

Further Suspension

The committee recommends further suspension to, amongst for other reasons, afford Senator Beyak with the opportunity to gain further perspective on the obligations of senators to “defend the principles of the Constitution and to uphold the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Response

Senator Beyak has been tried, found guilty, and punished for allowing five letters to be posted on her Senate website that the SEO determined to be racist. She was suspended for it. She experienced a huge financial loss and public embarrassment for it. Surely that is punishment enough for that particular action/inaction on her part. The principle of deterrence has been well upheld in that regard. It would be a breach of the most fundamental principles of justice that Senator Beyak be punished a second time for the same act of misbehaviour.

And it appears that the committee is not recommending further suspension for the posting of these five letters. Rather, it appears that they are recommending further suspension because, according to the committee, “Senator Beyak appears to deny a historical truth and displays conduct that ignores its racist underpinning.”

What “historical truth” is that?

The “historical truth” that she is accused of denying is “the cultural oppression imposed by the Residential School System, and the discriminatory objectives of the Indian Act’, and “the reality of racism towards Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

With respect, these are not “historical truths” that she is denying.

These are merely interpretations of history  that she partially disagrees with.

Senator Beyak said that the Indian Act in effect is racist and should be repealed. (So how can she be said to be ignoring the racist underpinning of the Act? She agrees that it has a racial underpinning. That’s why she advocates for its abolition!) She said that Indigenous peoples should be equal under the law. She said that Indigenous peoples are suffering because of the existence of such South-African-like things as reserves and status cards. Indigenous writers and spokesmen such as William Wuttunee, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, John Kim Bell, Calvin Helin, and many others, in varying degrees, said or indicated the same thing. This view was once the official policy of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . This is the view shared by millions of Canadians today.

Senator Beyak did not exhibit a trace of “racism” in her character by voicing these views. In fact her views were the views expressed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They are the opposite of racist.

But that is essentially what the committee is suggesting i.e. that Senator Beyak is a racist with racist views.

The committee recommends further training so that Senator Beyak may develop a “new understanding of Canada’s history” to better meet the (previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the committee’s original training recommendation, that would “guide her conduct in relation to Indigenous issues.” And she must complete this training “successfully”,  as to be judged by the committee , as a condition of “her continued presence in the Senate.”

With respect, the committee’s position in this regard constitutes nothing short of Orwellian thought control.

The committee is essentially saying that Senator Beyak, to stay in the Senate, must change her mind, must alter her inner thoughts  on this great matter of public interest to all Canadians.

She must learn to love and then outwardly praise Big Brother.

The committee is demanding that she undergo “training” such that she will change her opinions on a matter of great public interest. And if she doesn’t change her views and publicly announce that, then she will be suspended from the Senate, indefinitely, until she convinces the Senate than she has seen their light of orthodoxy.

They are indicating to her by their recommendations in this regard that she is not to have the right of free speech and freedom of thought and conscience on these Indigenous-related issues.

Her sincere and reasonable view, as a Senator with a duty to “represent minority interests”, in this case the interests of Indigenous Canadians, is that the Indian Act should be repealed and status cards eventually done away with. That is how she feels the situation of the Indigenous peoples in Canada would be bettered. Because the committee disagrees with this view of how she should carry out her duty in this regard, they threaten her with expulsion.

This is wrong.

The Senate, if it adopts the committee’s recommendation in this regard, would be dealing a severe blow to freedom of speech and thought in Canada.

It would be the Senate which would be in breach of the Charter of Rights and Values.

Apology

The original Senate recommendation in this regard was that Senator Beyak apologize “to the Senate” for her actions/inactions. No specific wording was prescribed. She apologized in writing to the Senate, saying that for allowing those five letters to be posted: “I apologize to all Senators”.

Now the committee is saying that this apology wasn’t good enough- that it was not in (the previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the original recommendation.

Now the committee says that what they meant was that Senator Beyak was not just to apologize to the Senators in the manner expressly ordered, but rather that she was to write an opus-like mea culpa, confessing all her ideological errors and “acknowledging the adverse effects her conduct had on Indigenous peoples” They also say that, contrary to the express wording of the order, she should have apologized to all Indigenous peoples, in addition to the Senate, and undertook to everyone to “take action in order to rectify the situation.” (No specifics as to what action she is to take.)

All the above is a shocking and illiberal case of “moving the goal line back” after the fact.

The committee is showing that it is demanding nothing short of the complete humiliation and ideological surrender of Senator Beyak as a condition of allowing her to remain in the Senate.

They are recommending subjective, ill-defined and almost impossible- to meet-conditions, thus setting up a classically Kafkaesque situation for Senator Beyak, which goes miles beyond the bounds of fairness or respect for legal process. And it shows incredible hostility and disrespect towards a Senator who merely

respectfully failed to conform with a highly contentious and debatable orthodoxy regarding residential schools and the Indian Act.

By their conduct the committee is dealing a devastating blow to free speech in Canada.

By their conduct the committee is acting in a manner that will cripple the ability of Senators to respectfully advocate new ways of looking at and solving old problems.

Conflict of Interest

Senator Murray Sinclair is the author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which report is the main source of the orthodoxy- the “historical truth”- of residential schools. Senator Beyak has said that it is her   opinion that this is no “historical truth”. To her this is an overly simplistic orthodoxy, lacking in nuance, balance and complexity which she respectfully disagrees with. Senator Sinclair is one her judges in this matter. As a former judge, Senator Sinclair would agree with the statement that judges are to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Senator Sinclair has a personal interest in this. By sitting in judgment of Senator Beyak, who partially challenges his views, and recommending such harsh and unprecedented measures against her, Senator Sinclair is giving rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest. He should have recused himself from this matter. Accepting the committee’s recommendations when its key member has an apparent conflict of interest taints the committee’s actions and will taint the Senate’s decision in this regard. This will harm the reputation of the Senate as a body that abides by fundamental legal principles and values.

February 17th, 2020

                       Part 3- Describing the Situation as of March 23 t h, 2020

In the week after February 17 t h political “friends” of Senator Beyak convinced her, in a swarm-like manner, to apologize to the Senate along the lines of what Senator Murray Sinclair said after-the-fact that he would have expected as an apology. A form of cringing mea culpa-for-everything apology was drafted for her and she, a good woman with little penchant for hard-ball politics or for what it takes in the hothouse world of politics to publicly stand up for oneself, especially when not one other person  would bravely publicly support her, on February 26 t h, dutifully read the prepared apology. If the exculpatory facts outlined above in my Response  were made known to her aforesaid “friends” and to the Senate generally they were communicated tepidly and weakly, in a private manner, and dismissed by all as of no relevance. The myth that she had “refused” the training would be the controlling narrative, and the facts be damned.

Accordingly her apology was heard, the reporting of it was generally sanctimonious and cruelly dismissive, and her cold and fundamentally indifferent colleagues were by and large generally unmoved and unwilling to buck Senator Sinclair’s implacable campaign to further kick Senator Beyak when she was already down, and when, as he well knew, she has indeed already fully complied, to the extent she was allowed to, with the Senate’s original disciplinary recommendations.

They suspended her again, this time for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, purportedly because she  “failed to complete the anti-racism training”  and so that “she can complete the prescribed training and take time to think about the harm she did to Indigenous   peoples by posting racist letters on her website”  and so that she can “understand the pain she caused by describing Indian residential schools in positive terms.”   (In fact saying that “some good” came from residential schools and that they were “well intentioned” is  not  describing them in “positive terms” and there was never any evidence of any “pain” suffered by anyone as the result of anything she had said.) Again, showing a cruel and heartless example of double jeopardy, she was suspended without pay or privileges. As a further condition they ordered her to take more “prescribed training.” At the end of her training the Senate-approved training centre must report back on “Beyak’s attendance and performance at the educational programs.” (All quotes from CBC Online News, February 27 t h, 2020)

Clearly, this “performance” requirement, to be judged solely by Senator Sinclair and his cowed colleagues, is a clear threat to Senator Beyak that unless she shows that she has had her brain and thoughts re-washed- re-wired- re-engineered- about what she originally said about residential schools ( again, said by many Indigenous graduates as evidenced in Part 1 above ) then she will likely not get back into the Senate. She must show that her mind is willingly captured by the orthodoxy that these schools were all genocidal, and she will have to publicly confess and profess that. She must be humiliated in full.

How cruel, indifferent and illiberal our Senate and our media has acted! What injustice can be done under the guise of lazy, unprincipled, sanctimonious righteousness!

March 23 r d, 2020.

“There is no crueller  tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.”- Montesquieu

   Senator Lynn Beyak- The Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a Heretic -Parts 1, 2 and 3

                                 Part 1 -Describing the Situation as at October 1 s t, 2019

It’s trite and true that some good came from residential schools.

Indigenous playwright Tomson Highway said:   “you may have heard 7000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission- “TRC”) witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that are positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”

Cecil King, a former student of the residential school at Spanish, Ontario, who went on to become a University Professor, said:   “You never get to hear the good things that happen in these places. I do not think that I could achieve anywhere near what I have been able to achieve without the resolve I learned in the residential school.”

Peter Johnson, former Chief of the Serpent River First Nation, who also attended the Spanish residential school, said :   “The residential school was the best thing that could have happened to me because that is where I met my wife of 45 years. The schooling I received there taught me independence.”

Basil Johnston, author of  Indian School Days , his chronicle of his experiences at the Spanish residential school, said: “In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational system?” I respond with a qualified yes.”

Harold Cardinal, author of Indigenous rights book,  The Unjust Society , said: “Much can be said about the inherent good intentions of the missionaries, and it is true that without their efforts the educational level of our people might be lower than it is today.”

Honorary Chief of the Inuvik Dene Band, Cece Hodgson-Mc Cauley, said:   “They say it is about time they stop the negative side and start reporting the good side of the residential school jackpot… I can swear on the Bible that my time in the convent was good…Our mother died when I was six and my brother John, was two-and- a-half. Dad had no choice but to put us on the last steamboat, The Hudson Bay Company’s stern-wheeler. It was fall time and Dad was a trapper. We went upriver to Fort Providence to the Catholic convent (residential school). I spent 10 years there, going home every summer for the holidays on the mission boat.”

Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, of Espanola, Ontario, was a personal friend of Basil Johnston.  They played football against each other. They went to Loyola College in Montreal together. His reflections on residential schools:  “The notion that pupils at residential schools were torn from happy homes is a myth. There may have been some of which I am unaware but in my experience a significant amount of children were rescued from starving on trap lines, many of whom were afflicted with TB (tuberculosis). In fact Spanish had a special floor to care for those. It is true that English was paramount, but how

else to equip the students to function off a particular reserve? It is strange that native spokesmen are reluctant to tout any success by them in the modern world…I suppose the silence reflects the motives of vocal elements and misguided followers.”

The above is representative of the multi-faceted, “good and bad” truth of residential schools.

But Canada’s political, academic, media and Indigenous elites have rejected this nuanced, multi-faceted truth.

Instead, in the manner of jealous, self-serving and insecure high priests of some cult, they have adopted a rigid, negative, devoid-of-any  good, black and white orthodoxy, which brooks neither opposition nor qualification, an  orthodoxy decreed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as follows:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and , through a process of elimination, cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”…Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And,  most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people Canada did all these things. (“the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy”)

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a heavily mixed Indigenous-non-Indigenous part of Northern Ontario, from life experience, education and common sense, like the mainly Indigenous persons quoted above, knows that the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy is false. And she dared say so publicly, and so brought the high priests of this orthodoxy down on her head. They metaphorically branded her with the Scarlet letter “R”, for “racist”, and suspended her from their Senate community with a command to take training to learn the Error of Her Ways as a condition of being allowed back in.

In early 2017 she wrote, echoing the opinion of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that Indigenous people should voluntarily give up their special, separate legal status and join the Canadian mainstream as legal equals. She also wrote that at least some good came out of residential schools. For making these defensible assertions, in careful and respectful terms- for challenging the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy- she was mocked by politicians from all parties as an ignorant, “hate speech”, racist rube and by most of the media as well, especially the high priests of the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy at media institutions like the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and the CBC. She was taken off

the Senate Indigenous Affairs Committee and there were calls for her resignation from the Senate!

In January of 2018, after she allowed some overwhelmingly  non-racist  letters of support from citizens to be posted on her Senate website- support for both her opinions, but more importantly, for her courage in exercising her duty of and right to free speech on this important national issue- and after refusing to remove any of these letters from her Senate website, she was kicked out of the Conservative Caucus entirely. Then, without due process or debate she was suspended from the Senate without pay for the balance of the Parliamentary session, physically escorted from the Senate chamber, locked out of her office, and then ordered, Maoist-like, to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training”.  It all constituted a shameful example of the embarrassingly primitive state of our national discussion of this issue, and more importantly, it showed the continuing, shameful and disgraceful failure on the part of all of our elites to uphold the principles of freedom of speech and due process, crucial Enlightenment rights and values enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Interestingly, to the extent any of the citizens’ letters of support might have been “not nice”, rough or offensive, (the Senate said a total of only five out of over one hundred fell into these categories), if this were in Europe those letters would have been legally protected as valid expressions of free speech. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights:

  “…protects not only the information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive but also those that offend, shock or disturb, such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society. Opinions expressed in strong or exaggerated language are also protected.”

Not so for the frail, hysterical, grim and prim Senators of Canada.

The Senate ordered Ms. Beyak to take an online course given by Indigenous Awareness Canada and entitled “201 Indigenous Certification”. The goal of the course was   “to build effective and positive relationships with Indigenous people”, focussing on   “racism towards Indigenous Peoples, Residential Schools, Chronology and Current Realities.”  She took and completed the course and received a suitable-for-framing “Indigenous Awareness” Certificate from Indigenous Awareness Canada.

But that wasn’t enough for the Senate.

The Senate also retained the taxpayer-funded Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), operating out of an office on Front Street in Toronto, to provide Ms. Beyak with “cultural competency training” (“the

training”). OFIFC is a Canadian taxpayer-funded organization “mandated to serve the needs of urban indigenous people by providing culturally appropriate services in urban communities…whose work is faithful to indigenous identity harmoniously inscribed within the four directions of the medicine wheel”, and with “everyday good living the foundation of OFIFC’s endeavours” (from their website).

(Their mandate being to serve the needs of urban indigenous people it is unclear what expertise they had to serve the needs of the Northern Ontario, small-town based, non-Indigenous Ms. Beyak.)

 There were three “training cycles”- cycles 1, 2 and 3. On May 16 t h OFIFC sent a full description of the curriculum and learning goals of each of cycles 1, 2 and 3 to Senator Beyak and Pierre Legault, the Senate Ethics Officer charged with the responsibility to ensure that she took and successfully completed all the mandated training.  Cycle 1 was definitely mandatory. There is some confusion as to whether Cycles 2 and 3 were mandatory. In any event, Senator Beyak agreed readily to take Cycles 2 and 3 “training.”

Senator Beyak took and successfully completed cycle 1 of the training on June 6 t h.

Ms. Terrelyn Fearn, “Training Director” of OFIFC, then undertook to Mr. Legault- and through him to the Senate of Canada- to honour the agreement and provide cycle 2 and 3 to Ms. Beyak prior to August 31, 2019.

The cycles 2 and 3 training was mutually arranged for August 26 and 27 at OFIFC’s Toronto office. In reliance Senator Beyak planned and paid for the costly return trip from Dryden to Toronto, involving a four hour drive from Dryden to Thunder Bay, a return Thunder Bay-Toronto flight and miscellaneous other travel expenses.

 On August 26 t h Senator Beyak arrived at the Friendship Centre in Toronto at 8:45 a.m. and signed in at 9 a.m. There was no one else present and no apparent training of others going on. And instead of being taken to the conference training room with others, as she had been for cycle 1 the previous June, she was taken to Ms. Fearn’s office where she was told that the cycles 2 and 3 training was not available to her!

No training whatsoever was given to her that day, except that she received a lecture about having “white privilege”, and she left the Friendship Centre “empty handed” in terms of training . OFIFC had refused to provide her the pre-agreed, cycles 2 and 3 training!

A wasted trip for Senator Beyak!

Senator Beyak wrote Mr. Legault very shortly after this, described the strange and unexpected events of August 26 t h, and asked for an explanation of OFIFC’s conduct.

Senator Beyak never heard back from Mr. Legault as to why OFIFC broke its undertaking to Senator Beyak and to the Senate of Canada to deliver to her the cycles 2 and 3 “cultural competency” training, knowing that she had travelled all the way from Dryden at her own expense to receive it. This all constitutes basic rudeness, and more importantly, bad faith, on the part of OFIFC.

Senator Beyak never received any apology or explanation from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault, the Senate or OFIFC for why OFIFC stood her up on August 26 t h.

Senator Beyak, despite repeated requests, has never received any explanation from any of Mr. Legault, OFIFC or the Senate as to why it was decided that training cycles 2 and 3 were “not available” to her.

Senator Beyak never received any offer of reimbursement of her wasted travel expenses from any of OFIFC, Mr. Legault or the Senate.

She was left to twist and dangle in a state of complete uncertainty.

Now, after the happening of all these summer events, and in complete and unconscionable disregard of the facts, a fresh persecution campaign started against Senator Beyak.

In mid-September Liberal Senator Peter Harder emailed known Liberal-friendly Canadian Press columnist Joan Bryden, telling her, amongst other things, that “Senator Beyak has so far refused to follow through on the Senate’s recommendations for remedial measures.”

In her ensuing September 24 t h Canadian Press column Ms. Bryden obediently wrote that “Senator Beyak refused to take sensitivity training.”

So maliciously false!

The cold, hard propagators of the   TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy, including the immediately above, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Carolyn Bennett, Senator Murray Sinclair, the Senate generally, the pitchfork and torches-bearing media, and all those cowardly others who sinned by their silences or their omissions when they should have protested the treatment of Senator Beyak, have all done a grave disservice to their country, to democracy’s most basic value of free speech, and more especially, to the long-term best interests of our Indigenous citizens, by their cultish, value-free and conscience-free treatment of Senator Beyak.

As the brill iant and distinguished Christian writer Marilynne Robinson aptly-to-the-situation wrote:

“In a democracy abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candour and disrupt thought.”

The great Polish intellectual Czeslaw Milosz, no stranger to ideological fanaticism and tyranny, wrote of the dependent, blindly obedient, near-schizophrenic “captive minds” of intellectuals and leaders living under tyranny, undergoing a constant struggle to hide their true thoughts on all public issues. This reality is present in Canada with respect to all matters Indigenous, including the TRC cultural genocide orthodoxy.

But not so with the independent, heroic Senator Beyak, who exhibits a compassionate and enlightened free mind, and who personifies Mr. Milosz’ urgings to intellectuals and leaders to , “at times of great cultural catastrophe, an intellectual’s task is not to offer consolation, but to secure the foundations of humanity endangered by ideological lies, to find anew seeds of good sense, ethical norms with which to resist despondency.”   She had the insight and courage to break with the habit of unquestioning deference to Canada’s “great men” on our profound, national Indigenous issues, because on these issues, in this situation, these “great men and women” of politics, academia and the media have made a huge, grievous mistake.

In this regard the political philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

“Great men may make mistakes…Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and often possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help destroy it all.”

 

Senator Beyak is a heroine of democracy and the best public friend the vast majority of powerless, impoverished and marginalized Indigenous Canadians could ever have.

She deserves an apology, a formal retraction of the scarlet letter “R” she was branded with, to be replaced with a large, gold letter “H”, for “heroine”,  a sincere and contrite apology for OFIFC’s inexplicable conduct, and a welcome back into the Senate.

October 1st, 2019

 

                                    Part 2- Describing the Situation as at February 20, 2020

On January 31 s t, 2020, after a shabby and biased investigation of the events partly described in Part 1, the Senate committee in charge of making recommendations to the Senate with respect to the issue of whether Senator Beyak had satisfied all the conditions of their previous discipline order against her, which committee was headed by a clearly conflict of interest-burdened  Murray Sinclair, whose Truth and Reconciliation Report had falsely decreed the “historical truth” of the “cultural genocide” caused by residential schools and the racism underlying the Indian Act, and the racism of Canadians past and present against Indigenous peoples generally, recommended that because in all   her training Senator Beyak had purportedly failed to learn this “historical truth”, that she should be further suspended and ordered to take further “cultural training”. They also ordered that unless she successfully completed this additional training, as judged  subjectively  by the committee, (i.e. by the conflicted Murray Sinclair), and shown that she had learned the error of her ways, then she might be suspended further!

The immediately below is my response to the committee’s Orwellian, free speech killing, mandatory brain-re-engineering decree by the conflicted Senator Sinclair-dominated committee’s “First Report” in this regard.

 

Response to First Report of Standing Committee of Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators dated January 31 s t, 2020 (the Report) -Peter Best, Lawyer, Sudbury

The writer assumes that the reader has read the Report.

At page 1 the committee states that “it was not clear to your committee if Senator Beyak had complied with all the conditions for her reinstatement to the Senate.”

Response

Senator Beyak had received training, as per the Senate’s original order, from Indigenous Awareness Canada, successfully completed it, and received an Indigenous Awareness Certificate in relation to it.

In his letter dated June 16 t h to the Senate the Senate Ethics Officer (the SEO), the expert to whom the supervision and assessment of this matter had been delegated, wrote that “…Senator Beyak has attended the training required by the Senate…and it was completed within the timeframe imposed.” (all italics added) There was no requirement that she complete the training “successfully ” in the minds of  the committee, as determined  after the fact , with “successfully”

meaning, in effect, “according to the committee’s opinions on Indigenous matters”.  Justice can never be so subjective. And, in any event, there never was a definition of what “successfully” was to mean. Further in any event, the SEO clearly determined that Senator Beyak had completed the training. He did not say that she had done so “unsuccessfully”. He had in mind the Indigenous Awareness Certificate and the trainer’s lack of complaint about anything  after Senator Beyak completed the Cycle 1 training. The clear determination of the expert, the SEO, should be deferred to. The committee reaching out to him, well after the fact, for clarification of what he meant by “completed”, to which question of course, because he obviously wasn’t there, he could give no opinion re “successfully”, is not an indication of anything. That Senator Beyak did complete the training to a reasonable standard is supported by the fact that the training provider, who had given the Cycle 1 training,  agreed to give Senator Beyak further training , which appears to be discretionary, additional training, which Senator Beyak agreed to take, while seeming to be under no Senate-ordered compulsion to do so. She essentially volunteered to take this extra training. Why would the trainer agree to give Senator Beyak additional training, called Cycles 2 and 3 training, if she had already secretly  determined that she was “unwilling to learn”? (Nothing negative in this regard was ever indicated to Senator Beyak.)

 If, as the committee reports the trainer as saying, Senator Beyak had “failed to exhibit any willingness to learn”, then why did the trainer, by her conduct, give her a “pass” (as opposed to a “fail”) in relation to her Cycle 1 training? Why did she not mention the Indigenous Awareness Certificate?  Why did she agree  to give Senator Beyak the additional training scheduled for late August? If Senator Beyak was “unwilling to learn” then why did the trainer not report this  to the SEO in June, and then, after the August 26 t h events, immediately after that? Why did the trainer only opine on this alleged failure on Senator Beyak’s part in early October, weeks  after Senator Beyak wrote the SEO in late August and told him that she had been effectively and unexpectedly  stood up by the trainer on August 26 t h? Why did the trainer not immediately report the events of August 26 t h to the SEO? Why did the trainer unilaterally,  with no notice to either the SEO or to Senator Beyak , cancel the Cycles 2 and 3 training, when she had already passed her with respect to the Cycle 1 training, and when she had specifically undertaken  to provide this further training?

The committee says that it “does not seek to ascribe blame for the training that did not occur as anticipated.” With respect, that is being blind to the facts . It was the fault of the trainer and her unilateral actions that the training did not take place. (It is clear from Senator Beyak’s email to the SEO reporting on her being refused the training after she had come all the way to Toronto from Dryden at her own expense to get it that it was her politely challenging the accusation from the trainer that Senator Beyak had “white privilege” that put the trainer’s nose out joint and contributed to the trainer cancelling the training. This was bad faith on the part of the trainer. Education should be a two-way street. A trainer should expect,  and welcome, hard questions, respectful

challenges and respectful dialogue. That how all good teachers learn and get better.

The Five Letters.

The committee recommends “no further recommendation” in relation to this, therefor it will not be subject to comment herein, except to say that non-juridical wording like “moral obligation”, and “should have sent a strong signal” reflect intense subjectivity on part of the committee. Legal rights and responsibilities should be based only  on clear, objective, written language, otherwise the person who is the object of the proceeding never really knows what he/she is being accused of or what he/she is required to do to fulfill a disciplinary order. This is unfair and is a fundamental breach of due process.

Further Suspension

The committee recommends further suspension to, amongst for other reasons, afford Senator Beyak with the opportunity to gain further perspective on the obligations of senators to “defend the principles of the Constitution and to uphold the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Response

Senator Beyak has been tried, found guilty, and punished for allowing five letters to be posted on her Senate website that the SEO determined to be racist. She was suspended for it. She experienced a huge financial loss and public embarrassment for it. Surely that is punishment enough for that particular action/inaction on her part. The principle of deterrence has been well upheld in that regard. It would be a breach of the most fundamental principles of justice that Senator Beyak be punished a second time for the same act of misbehaviour.

And it appears that the committee is not recommending further suspension for the posting of these five letters. Rather, it appears that they are recommending further suspension because, according to the committee, “Senator Beyak appears to deny a historical truth and displays conduct that ignores its racist underpinning.”

What “historical truth” is that?

The “historical truth” that she is accused of denying is “the cultural oppression imposed by the Residential School System, and the discriminatory objectives of the Indian Act’, and “the reality of racism towards Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

With respect, these are not “historical truths” that she is denying.

These are merely interpretations of history  that she partially disagrees with.

Senator Beyak said that the Indian Act in effect is racist and should be repealed. (So how can she be said to be ignoring the racist underpinning of the Act? She agrees that it has a racial underpinning. That’s why she advocates for its abolition!) She said that Indigenous peoples should be equal under the law. She said that Indigenous peoples are suffering because of the existence of such South-African-like things as reserves and status cards. Indigenous writers and spokesmen such as William Wuttunee, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, John Kim Bell, Calvin Helin, and many others, in varying degrees, said or indicated the same thing. This view was once the official policy of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau . This is the view shared by millions of Canadians today.

Senator Beyak did not exhibit a trace of “racism” in her character by voicing these views. In fact her views were the views expressed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They are the opposite of racist.

But that is essentially what the committee is suggesting i.e. that Senator Beyak is a racist with racist views.

The committee recommends further training so that Senator Beyak may develop a “new understanding of Canada’s history” to better meet the (previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the committee’s original training recommendation, that would “guide her conduct in relation to Indigenous issues.” And she must complete this training “successfully”,  as to be judged by the committee , as a condition of “her continued presence in the Senate.”

With respect, the committee’s position in this regard constitutes nothing short of Orwellian thought control.

The committee is essentially saying that Senator Beyak, to stay in the Senate, must change her mind, must alter her inner thoughts  on this great matter of public interest to all Canadians.

She must learn to love and then outwardly praise Big Brother.

The committee is demanding that she undergo “training” such that she will change her opinions on a matter of great public interest. And if she doesn’t change her views and publicly announce that, then she will be suspended from the Senate, indefinitely, until she convinces the Senate than she has seen their light of orthodoxy.

They are indicating to her by their recommendations in this regard that she is not to have the right of free speech and freedom of thought and conscience on these Indigenous-related issues.

Her sincere and reasonable view, as a Senator with a duty to “represent minority interests”, in this case the interests of Indigenous Canadians, is that the Indian Act should be repealed and status cards eventually done away with. That is how she feels the situation of the Indigenous peoples in Canada would be bettered. Because the committee disagrees with this view of how she should carry out her duty in this regard, they threaten her with expulsion.

This is wrong.

The Senate, if it adopts the committee’s recommendation in this regard, would be dealing a severe blow to freedom of speech and thought in Canada.

It would be the Senate which would be in breach of the Charter of Rights and Values.

Apology

The original Senate recommendation in this regard was that Senator Beyak apologize “to the Senate” for her actions/inactions. No specific wording was prescribed. She apologized in writing to the Senate, saying that for allowing those five letters to be posted: “I apologize to all Senators”.

Now the committee is saying that this apology wasn’t good enough- that it was not in (the previously undisclosed) “spirit and intent” of the original recommendation.

Now the committee says that what they meant was that Senator Beyak was not just to apologize to the Senators in the manner expressly ordered, but rather that she was to write an opus-like mea culpa, confessing all her ideological errors and “acknowledging the adverse effects her conduct had on Indigenous peoples” They also say that, contrary to the express wording of the order, she should have apologized to all Indigenous peoples, in addition to the Senate, and undertook to everyone to “take action in order to rectify the situation.” (No specifics as to what action she is to take.)

All the above is a shocking and illiberal case of “moving the goal line back” after the fact.

The committee is showing that it is demanding nothing short of the complete humiliation and ideological surrender of Senator Beyak as a condition of allowing her to remain in the Senate.

They are recommending subjective, ill-defined and almost impossible- to meet-conditions, thus setting up a classically Kafkaesque situation for Senator Beyak, which goes miles beyond the bounds of fairness or respect for legal process. And it shows incredible hostility and disrespect towards a Senator who merely

respectfully failed to conform with a highly contentious and debatable orthodoxy regarding residential schools and the Indian Act.

By their conduct the committee is dealing a devastating blow to free speech in Canada.

By their conduct the committee is acting in a manner that will cripple the ability of Senators to respectfully advocate new ways of looking at and solving old problems.

Conflict of Interest

Senator Murray Sinclair is the author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report, which report is the main source of the orthodoxy- the “historical truth”- of residential schools. Senator Beyak has said that it is her   opinion that this is no “historical truth”. To her this is an overly simplistic orthodoxy, lacking in nuance, balance and complexity which she respectfully disagrees with. Senator Sinclair is one her judges in this matter. As a former judge, Senator Sinclair would agree with the statement that judges are to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Senator Sinclair has a personal interest in this. By sitting in judgment of Senator Beyak, who partially challenges his views, and recommending such harsh and unprecedented measures against her, Senator Sinclair is giving rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest. He should have recused himself from this matter. Accepting the committee’s recommendations when its key member has an apparent conflict of interest taints the committee’s actions and will taint the Senate’s decision in this regard. This will harm the reputation of the Senate as a body that abides by fundamental legal principles and values.

February 17th, 2020

                       Part 3- Describing the Situation as of March 23 t h, 2020

In the week after February 17 t h political “friends” of Senator Beyak convinced her, in a swarm-like manner, to apologize to the Senate along the lines of what Senator Murray Sinclair said after-the-fact that he would have expected as an apology. A form of cringing mea culpa-for-everything apology was drafted for her and she, a good woman with little penchant for hard-ball politics or for what it takes in the hothouse world of politics to publicly stand up for oneself, especially when not one other person  would bravely publicly support her, on February 26 t h, dutifully read the prepared apology. If the exculpatory facts outlined above in my Response  were made known to her aforesaid “friends” and to the Senate generally they were communicated tepidly and weakly, in a private manner, and dismissed by all as of no relevance. The myth that she had “refused” the training would be the controlling narrative, and the facts be damned.

Accordingly her apology was heard, the reporting of it was generally sanctimonious and cruelly dismissive, and her cold and fundamentally indifferent colleagues were by and large generally unmoved and unwilling to buck Senator Sinclair’s implacable campaign to further kick Senator Beyak when she was already down, and when, as he well knew, she has indeed already fully complied, to the extent she was allowed to, with the Senate’s original disciplinary recommendations.

They suspended her again, this time for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, purportedly because she  “failed to complete the anti-racism training”  and so that “she can complete the prescribed training and take time to think about the harm she did to Indigenous   peoples by posting racist letters on her website”  and so that she can “understand the pain she caused by describing Indian residential schools in positive terms.”   (In fact saying that “some good” came from residential schools and that they were “well intentioned” is  not  describing them in “positive terms” and there was never any evidence of any “pain” suffered by anyone as the result of anything she had said.) Again, showing a cruel and heartless example of double jeopardy, she was suspended without pay or privileges. As a further condition they ordered her to take more “prescribed training.” At the end of her training the Senate-approved training centre must report back on “Beyak’s attendance and performance at the educational programs.” (All quotes from CBC Online News, February 27 t h, 2020)

Clearly, this “performance” requirement, to be judged solely by Senator Sinclair and his cowed colleagues, is a clear threat to Senator Beyak that unless she shows that she has had her brain and thoughts re-washed- re-wired- re-engineered- about what she originally said about residential schools ( again, said by many Indigenous graduates as evidenced in Part 1 above ) then she will likely not get back into the Senate. She must show that her mind is willingly captured by the orthodoxy that these schools were all genocidal, and she will have to publicly confess and profess that. She must be humiliated in full.

How cruel, indifferent and illiberal our Senate and our media has acted! What injustice can be done under the guise of lazy, unprincipled, sanctimonious righteousness!

March 23 r d, 2020.

“There is no crueller  tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.”- Montesquieu