Carney’s Father and his Role in the Indigenous School System

‘How will the fact that his father was a senior administrator in the Indigenous education system affect Mark Carney’s view of the graves controversy?’

Brian Giesbrecht

First published by the Western Standard on March 17, 2025

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Dallas Brodie, a BC MLA who said what writer Brian Giesbrecht considers is now unsayable, that ‘no graves have been found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.  Photo from BC Conservative.

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Canadian politicians should know by now that the subject of Indian Residential Schools and unmarked graves is toxic, one that cannot be discussed openly and honestly. And BC MLA Dallas Brodie and BC Conservative leader John Rustad just learned that the hard way.

Brodie tweeted out the simple fact that no graves have been found at Kamloops.

Rustad, tried to limit the damage he feared that this true statement would cause in a reply that only made things worse. Outraged Indigenous leaders declared that their feelings had been hurt by this brazen display of honesty, and demanded that Brodie be ousted from the party. Premier Eby piled on, as did almost everyone else.

Rustad then manufactured the excuse that Brodie had “mocked” Indigenous people for the decision to give her “the old heave ho.” As a result of this exercise of “leadership,” Rustad was left with a badly damaged party.

What these politicians didn’t seem to understand is the fact that since May 27, 2021, when the “215 at Kamloops” claim was made, nothing can be said publicly about the fact that the claim was false from the start. Or that honest discussion about residential schools is no longer possible in this country. If these subjects come up, a politician is best advised to mumble something about “reconciliation” and then quickly move on to another topic.

Other politicians have learned this lesson the hard way as well. In 2021 a brand new Conservative cabinet minister in Manitoba tried to say some rather innocuous things about residential schools. He said that while some students had bad experiences at the schools, the intention was to provide an education, and many former students reported positive experiences.

This was the truth — even the TRC Report has a chapter entitled “Warm Memories” that consists entirely of former students reporting their good experiences at residential schools. But Wab Kinew, the-then future Premier of Manitoba, was not interested in facts. He literally leaped to the stage and very publicly rebuked the startled minister.

Even the fact that this new cabinet minister is Métis didn’t save him. Kinew lit into him with the bogus claim that the stated purpose of residential schools was “to kill the Indian in the child.” The fact that it was an American who had never even visited Canada who made that statement in an entirely different context mattered not a whit. That cabinet minister was toast, while Kinew’s career soared.

And remember in 2008 when Pierre Poilievre was publicly scolded by PM Stephen Harper? Poilievre dared to opine that people who had been harmed at residential schools should be compensated, but those who had simply attended — many with good results — should not. His leader, Stephen Harper humiliated Poilievre for voicing this completely common sense opinion.

Poilievre was in the political doghouse for years, and never forgot this painful lesson. The fact that he was right and Harper was wrong didn’t matter. He should not have risked offending Indigenous sensibilities by speaking honestly. He learned his lesson. Poilievre has never publicly voiced common sense opinions on controversial Indigenous matters to this day.

Justin Trudeau never made such a mistake. He accomplished this, since 2015,  by giving the chiefs virtually everything they wanted, and never disagreeing with them on anything contentious.

It should be remembered that he not only accepted the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015  before he even read it, but agreed to implement all 94 Calls to Action without even having the costs of doing so assessed. Had he taken the time to do so he would have quickly concluded that what was basically a socialist’s wish list, that included items that had nothing to do with truth or reconciliation — such as additional funding for the CBC — would have bankrupted the country for a generation if all of them were implemented .

But Trudeau never publicly  questioned any part of the TRC report, although he found ways to avoid implementing the most outrageously expensive and unworkable of the ‘Calls.’

And when the Kamloops claim was made on May 27, 2021, falsely claiming that an Indian band had found the remains of 215 Indigenous children, Trudeau not only immediately accepted the claim, but ordered that flags at federal buildings be flown at half mast not only across Canada, but across the world. He then — virtually inviting fraudulent claims — made $320,000,000 available to any Indigenous community that wanted to make a similar specious attack on the public purse.

To cap it all off, since 2015 Trudeau has spent more than three times as much public money on Indigenous matters as any previous Canadian prime minister, without achieving any notable results in the quality of life for the many members of the Indigenous underclass, and making  them even more dependent on the taxpayer than they already were. The massive debt with which Trudeau leaves Canada is based in large part on this enormous and wasteful spending on all things Indigenous.

And that brings us to Mark Carney, our new instant Prime Minister. How will he do on the Indigenous file?

Mark Carney knows a lot about this subject. He was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, a part of Canada which is heavily Indigenous. His father, Robert Carney, taught at schools there, and rose to become NWT’s Superintendent of School Programmes. He was intimately acquainted with education in the North.

In other words, Robert Carney was one of that very cadre of teachers and educators who are today accused by Indigenous activists of committing cultural genocide — or even actual genocide — against Indigenous children for attempting to provide them with an education at day and residential schools. But the reality is that Robert Carney — like the overwhelming majority of yesterday’s educators — was a conscientious teacher devoted to the education of Indigenous children.

The education of northern Indians (Dene) and Eskimo (now called Inuit) became a vexing problem for educators like Carney in the post-war years. They had to find answers for questions like “What  should education consist of? Should Indigenous people continue with their ancient lifestyle of hunting, or should attempts be made to educate them for life in the modern world?”

The Catholic Church had been chiefly tasked with providing the little education that Indigenous children received, but after 1873, the federal government became increasingly involved. Robert Carney was one of the people making important decisions.

One of those decisions was that the children from the remote, scattered communities would be transported to larger communities where they would stay at hostels and attend the local schools. The results were mixed at best, as they are today on all matters pertaining to Indigenous education. Indigenous children, to this day, achieve less and drop out earlier than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

The Carney family moved to Edmonton when Mark was six, and Robert Carney became a professor of education at the University of Alberta, where he became known as an authority on northern education. He wrote about the education of Indians and Eskimo, and made an important submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in 1996 on the subject of residential school education.

The gist of one of his papers that discussed residential schools was the important contributions that Catholic orders of priests and nuns had made to the education of Indians and Eskimo in the high North. He spoke about the importance of residential schools, and how the schools were often the medical and social centres of the communities they served. He wrote other helpful papers relating to Indigenous education as well.

Robert Carney was critical of the royal commission for virtually ignoring the very serious alcohol problem that was even then plaguing the northern Indigenous population. The commission’s report devoted only a couple of its 56,000 pages to a discussion of the huge Indigenous alcohol scourge, and concluded that it was not a problem.

Carney pointed out that this was simply denial on the part of the RCAP commissioners. Fetal alcohol problems, particularly in the North, were even then a serious problem.

There is nothing remarkable in what Robert Carney wrote. Just common sense observations about the difficulties of educating people from a hunting culture, and the tensions that existed between the church and government about how best to proceed. Carney did not hesitate to criticize the flaws of residential schooling, but he also did not hesitate to point out their good points.

On balance, his view of residential schools was positive. If “atrocities” or secret burials had taken place at residential schools, Robert Carney would have been the first person to raise the alarm. He didn’t do so because those things didn’t happen.

Given his father’s Indigenous education expertise, Mark Carney knows a lot about residential schools and Indigenous issues generally. Now that he is Prime Minister, will he say something sensible about them, or will he repeat his predecessor’s ill-informed opinion that they were genocidal places where thousands of Indigenous children met horrible deaths, to be buried in secrecy by…. people like his father?

Will Mark Carney repeat any of things his father said about residential schools — common sense observations about the many practical problems that have always stood in the way of  Indigenous education, and the fact that residential schools were considered to be a practical way of addressing those problems?

Will he point out that the schools were generally well run by conscientious staff like his father, staff who did their best for the children? Will he note that there is no evidence to support the claim that 215 Indigenous children were secretly buried at Kamloops, and thousands of others elsewhere?

Or will he choose to go along with today’s accepted narrative — namely, that all residential schools were horrible places where teachers inflicted atrocities on the students, and where thousands of students died and were buried under sinister circumstances?

Will he point out the fact that his father was one of the very northern educators that the narrative smears, and that this narrative is entirely untrue?

Or will he go along with a false narrative that throws good people, like his father — and Dallas Brodie — under the bus?