Chris Selley: Robert Carney's story is the story of Canada Liberals don't talk about (2025)

Reasonable Canadians should be able to agree, I think and hope, that Mark Carney needn’t answer for anything his father Robert Carney did or said as principal of a federal Indigenous day school in the Northwest Territories — or for any of the things he said in that capacity, or later on as an academic at the University of Alberta.

Things like saying “a culturally retarded child in the context of the Northwest Territories is a child from a Native background who for various reasons has not been in regular attendance in school.”

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Things like defending residential schools for Indigenous children as having done good: “A number of interviewees expressed positive comments about their experiences in residential schools and hostels, while others deplored what they described as the excessive attention given to negative incidents related to these institutions,” Robert Carney wrote of a study he conducted in 1991.

“Those who ‘came to teach’ European values and skills to aboriginal people during the period … often failed to achieve their objectives,” he wrote later, “but their efforts in this regard cannot be viewed as being wholly destructive or ill-intended.”

Or things that Robert Carney did like criticizing the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples for being “dominated” by “the Aboriginal perspective,” meaning “residential schools (were) invariably cast in an unfavourable light.”

“I’m not going to talk about my late father during an election campaign” would have been a perfectly acceptable answer for Carney to give, in my view. But a Liberal spokesperson decided to make a communications exercise out of her response to CBC’s Indigenous unit, which published a balanced report on the elder Carney’s record this week. And as political communication often does these days, it made things worse.

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“The residential and day school systems are an undeniably painful chapter in our country’s history, with real harms that last to this day. In his first weeks as prime minister, Mark Carney has taken important steps to ensure that advancing reconciliation is a foundational commitment of our new government,” Liberal spokesperson Jenna Ghassabeh told the public broadcaster, which paraphrased the rest of her response as this (in the CBC’s words): “A Carney government would be informed by Indigenous perspective to understand these deep and lasting injustices and commit to the important work outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

We take note of nuances; we don’t make cartoons of people

Pretty weak, no? Not answering the question is de rigueur for government spokespeople, but this isn’t just any old issue. It’s radioactive. And someone like Robert Carney should make for an excellent subject of historical discussion — not because he was especially famous or consequential; quite the opposite. If he were just any old important dead white guy, it would be easy for the media to denounce him purely by modern standards, not those of the time, and with little regard to his actual record.

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(The cancelling of Egerton Ryerson, the founder of public education in Ontario who was dead before residential schools even took hold as government policy, is the perfect example of this, in my view. No one had the courage to question the baying mob, and now Ryerson University is Toronto Metropolitan University, for no good reason at all.)

But Robert Carney was the father of the current Liberal prime minister, who’s campaigning to stay on, and so a basic double-standard of Canadian propriety demands we think about it a bit more before chucking him over the side. We take note of nuances; we don’t make cartoons of people. For example, CBC noted, Carney stressed in a 1965 radio interview that schools should “want (Indigenous students) to not forget their origins, … not to forget their backgrounds and to instil in them a sense of pride and a sense of belonging.”

They should feel, the senior Carney said, that “the culture from which they come is a good culture.”

The Liberals in particular could benefit from an honest reckoning with Robert Carney’s history, because they have been abysmally unserious in their philosophical approach to reconciliation with Indigenous people thus far. When the until-recently prime minister, whose father was also prime minister, accepted the findings of the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, he accepted that he, his cabinet, and every prime minister (his father very much included) and cabinet since Confederation had committed genocide.

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He didn’t believe that. It was just the easiest thing to say … and then hardly anyone asked him about it, ever again.

In a normal functioning democracy, a prime minister making such an admission would resign as a matter of course. Instead the Liberals still invite Jean Chrétien to their events and swoon at his feet. This is the former Indian Affairs Minister, author of the infamously assimilationist (and later withdrawn) 1969 White Paper, who claimed never to have heard a whisper about abuse at residential schools despite his department being informed of plenty, and who reportedly adopted an Indigenous son on a whim as a PR exercise … and later admitted to journalist Lawrence Martin regretting the haste with which he and his wife made that decision.

“Though he was the Indian Affairs minister, Chrétien didn’t think to check into the long history of disappointments and tragedies white families experienced in raising native children,” Martin wrote in his 1995 biography of Chrétien.

“Nobody told me that there was a big problem to take Indians, that the record was not good,” Chrétien told Martin. “We did not even look at that.”

If a potential Carney government is serious about reconciliation, it will need to confront this reality of our history with Indigenous people, rather than indulging in these luxurious double standards.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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