Denialismus zu kriminalisieren ist nicht der Weg zur Wahrheit

If the comments to the article are any guide, it looks like the commenters are doing their best to debunk the author’s assertion.

At any rate, I don’t think there’s any means that such legislation could ever meet the fairly high bar that hate speech needs for it to pass Charter protections. Unless of course someone were to invoke s33, but that’s forbidden, unless you’re going after trans kids…

>But the proposal in Ms. Murray’s final report to criminalize denialism goes even further. She provides an impossibly broad definition of denialism, including minimizing the harm of residential schools, saying the death rates were typical for the period, saying that we don’t know the truth and that there is a conspiracy to exaggerate deaths, and that it wasn’t a genocide.

I suppose we should be thankful that the pro-denialism crowd are terrible at advocating for their side, haha. “An impossibly broad definition of denialism…including saying that there is a conspiracy to exaggerate deaths” makes the op-ed writer sound like a Toronto Sun-tier reactionary.

>To be clear, it is foolishness to try to minimize the harm many Indigenous children and families suffered at and because of residential schools. We know that there were children who were forced to attend, and there is no justification for forcibly separating a child from their loving family. We know there were children who were abused, who died, and who disappeared. Ms. Murray’s report references some of the horrifying stories of medical experimentation on children, including the use of experimental vaccines, and of pharmaceutical and nutritional testing. This is the stuff of horror films.

>But Ms. Murray’s controversial call to criminalize speech distracts from and undermines the importance of this work. Much remains unknown about unmarked burial sites, and creating a broad criminal sanction around this topic will not allow for a full investigation to take place. The stories of the people who attended residential schools ought to be our central focus. There are people who want to minimize the terrible policy of residential schools, but these stories – not criminalizing speech – need to be part of the answer.

There’s something perverse about the author making the “Just tell your stories harder instead of *criminalising speech* or else you’ll undermine your cause!” argument when she is running interference for hate propagandists whose entire schtick is screaming that residential school survivors’ stories are all fake.