"Canada is Nazi Germany"

So I don't know when Facebook went from a burgeoning social media upstart that was frequented by teenagers who migrated from MySpace (yeah, remember that?) to a platform of misinformation. It seems like one day it was just my classmates and I posting on each other's walls about homework, and the next I'm closing the browser because of people denying the existence of COVID, of residential schools, or even the Holocaust. 

Which leads me to the title of this post. Someone ungainly and enthusiastically accusing current Prime Minister Trudeau of being a Nazi and comparing present day Canada to Nazi Germany. I don't think this person appreciates the irony of their statements. 

The comment was made regarding reopening plans as the pandemic seems to finally be reaching its terminus (fingers crossed). If this comment was made on another recent news topic then it would have been very topical and perhaps even insightful. 

British Columbia recently announced the gristly discovery of 215 bodies of Indigenous children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. 215 children who were missing up until now. 

I cannot deny that Canada, as a whole, has been a peaceful country for many people. Particularly sitting on the rock of Newfoundland, it feels like an isolated part even for an isolated country. It has been easy to live blissfully ignorant of the undercurrents and Canada's sordid history with the Indigenous people who lived on these lands, and whose unceded territory that I and many others have built our homes on. It has been more than easy to say, "oh we're not racist like the Americans", and being satisfied with that as a standard. Of course, in these words I reveal my own extensive privilege to say I have been able to live in ignorance. 

In 2009, Canada's then-Prime Minister Harper even told the world at the G20 "[Canada has] no history of colonialism..." We'll let that sink in for a moment. No colonialism? The Indigenous people all got up and left the land for the settlers perhaps? Or cordially invited displacement, resettlement and forced assimilation? 

This is not the Canada I have come to known in learning about the history of the Indigenous People in Canada. In 1910, Duncan Campbell Scott (the first topic when Googling him is his poetic prowess), the then Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, said that the deaths of children in residential schools will not deter from "the final solution" of the "Indian Problem". 30 years before the genocide of the Jewish people as "the final solution" of the "Jewish Question". We'll let that sink in for a moment, too. 

Scott got as far as acknowledging that Indigenous children died at much higher rates in the schools than in their communities (or "villages" in his terms) but did not see this as a deterrent. It's been calculated that Indigenous children died at the same rate as POW in Nazi Germany camps. Let's rephrase that: children in schools in Canada died at the same rate as prisoners of war in Nazi Germany. They died because they were born Indigenous. 

So, random person on Facebook, you are partially right in a way. We can certainly compare Canada's genocide of the Indigenous People to other genocides. You are even rather insightful, though not in the way you meant to be, when calling Canada Nazi Germany.