Opinion: Murray Sinclair Changed Canadian History

I spotted him during a break in testimony that day at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.

“Mr. Sinclair, my name’s Chris Curtis and I’m a reporter at…”

“The Gazette,” he interrupted.

“Wow, I’m honoured that you’d even know.”

“I didn’t say you were any good,” Murray Sinclair said, looking me dead in the eyes. After a few seconds, he smiled and extended his hand. Though I was the one imposing on him, Sinclair used his wit to put me at ease. I’ll never forget that.

April 26, 2013, was the last day of testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) stop in Montreal. It was also one of my first big assignments as a rookie reporter at The Montreal Gazette and my editors would’ve hounded me for missing a chance at interviewing Sinclair, the chief commissioner of the TRC.

He could have politely brushed me off. After all, Sinclair had just listened to hours of harrowing testimony, keeping it together as elders detailed the torture they endured when they were children in the residential school system. He probably could have used a few quiet minutes to steel himself for more pain. Instead, he showed me grace because he knew that his mandate, beyond giving a platform to those survivors, was to make sure all Canadians hear their story.

Throughout Sinclair’s six years of travelling across Canada and listening to survivors, some 6,500 people shared their story with the TRC. Having attended one three-day session, I can only guess at the weight of those horrors on Sinclair. To sit in the comfort of my ignorance and watch an elderly person break as they describe the most humiliating, degrading experiences that could ever be visited upon a child, it broke me in ways I never imagined possible.

“Everywhere we go, people tell me ‘I never knew. I never knew this was happening,’” Sinclair said. “Well, now you know. And now that you know, what are you going to do about it?”

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Sinclair died Monday at a hospital in Winnipeg. He was 73. The world was a better place with him in it.

Before his time at the TRC, Sinclair spent his life fighting for justice — an elusive concept for Indigenous people living in Canada. In 1988, he served as co-commissioner of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, arguing that an Indigenous person’s history of suffering under colonialism should be taken into account when being sentenced for a crime. After all, so many of those convicted of crimes were themselves the victims of horrendous violence at the hands of the state. 

Sinclair’s work on the inquiry led Canada to adopt the Gladue principles, which require judges to consider an alternative to prison in some cases involving Indigenous defendants. Today, the Gladue principles are a bedrock of the Canadian judicial system. And while the system is still extremely flawed — Indigenous people represent less than 5 per cent of Canada’s population while 30 per cent of federal inmates are Indigenous — Sinclair fought to make it less unfair.

This alone would be enough to make Sinclair one of the most consequential figures in our time. And that’s not counting his appointment as Manitoba’s first Indigenous judge, the five years he spent in Canada’s Senate and, most recently, his role as chancellor of Queen’s University.

But no matter how important those accomplishments are, Sinclair’s leadership of the TRC changed the course of Canadian history and improved the lives of countless Indigenous people. 

In the TRC’s damning 2015 report, Sinclair pressed the federal government to implement 94 calls to action that would begin repairing the damage done by hundreds of years of colonial rule. Among those recommendations, the TRC called on the federal and provincial governments to:

• End long-term water advisories in nearly 200 Indigenous communities across Canada.
• Launch an inquiry into the alarming number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada.
• Adopt the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
• Massively reform the child welfare system by transferring it from the provinces to Indigenous communities themselves.
• Close the gap in educational funding between non-Indigenous and Indigenous students.

Ottawa and the provinces have been slow to implement the calls to action — the Yellowhead Institute estimates that, at this pace, it might take another 57 years for them to be complete — but I shudder to think of what this country would look like without them.

It feels almost easy now to take the TRC’s work for granted.

The language of reconciliation has been co-opted by financial institutions who will start meetings with a land acknowledgement while systematically denying insurance coverage for anyone whose postal code is on a federal reservation.

And reconciliation has been the calling card of the federal Liberals, whose promises to transform Canada’s relationship with the First Peoples led to a record turnout among Indigenous voters during the 2015 federal election. That same government’s lawyers are arguing, in court, that Canada is under no legal obligation to provide First Nations with clean drinking water.

But even though these institutions are bungling reconciliation, they know that silence is no longer an option. Because we know the truth now and we know that truth because of people like Murray Sinclair. 

Or do we? 

Most of us who’ve been paying attention for long enough expected the government to flounder on reconciliation. But until recently I never imagined the truth would be up for debate. Because we know — from thousands of hours of testimony, from church records and reams of evidence — that upwards of 6,000 children died while attending residential school.

And yet, the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan four summers ago has fuelled the rise of a new form of racism in Canada: residential school denialism. Far from being relegated to online forums and perennial losers like Jon and Barbara Kay, the country’s largest newspaper chain and think tanks like the Fraser Institute have floated the idea that there are no bodies buried at these sites.

This goes beyond the ignorant backbenchers who insist that “not all residential schools were bad” and promoting the colonial logic that Indigenous people need to be civilized. This is an attack on truth itself and the 150,000 children subjected to state-sanctioned torture and pedophilia. 

I have no doubt that history will remember the denialists as charlatans and useful idiots. And it feels like a descration to associate such ghoulish people with the memory of a man like Murray Sinclair. But today — when some of us take a moment to pray for Sinclair, his family and all the people he fought for — remember that lesser people are fighting every day to undo his good work.

And this cannot stand.

So I must come back to Sinclair’s words from that day in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. You know the truth. Now what are you going to do about it?