Chretien called out over comments on residential schools | CTV News

Residential school abuse reported to department while Jean Chrétien was minister, records show

Wait, someone expected Cretien to be a competent Minister of the Crown?

Chretien's 87 years old. I think he can be let off the hook a bit for not remembering a complaint from fifty years ago. That being said his legacy still has to take it's lumps over the residential schools, as it appears things didn't change too much in those places for the children even when management shifted from the churches to the federal government.

All those guys were too busy being Quebecois victims to notice the real victims.

What did the one Quebecois nationalist shit-house poet entitle his book back in the 1960's that got them all riled up about their victimization at the hands of the maudit Anglais, "White N****rs of North America" or something equally squee? Like they were being treated worse than the Natives or the Catholics in Northern Ireland? Good times, great memories for all.

I agree with Thanos that Chretien's memory probably isn't what it used to be and/or the plea may not have even reached his desk. A couple of points:

-More than just taking lumps on the residential school system still happening on his watch (both as Trudeau Senior's Indian Affairs Minister and during the first few years of his own premiership), Chretien and Trudeau Senior both deserve criticism over the 1969 White Paper and its goal of completely assimilating Indigenous people into the mainstream and erasing their distinct identity, which was the whole purpose of the residential school system.

-As for the state of Quebec at the time, the guy who wrote White N-Words Of North America went way overboard but it wasn't like things were all that rosy in Quebec at the time. There actually was a fair-sized wealth gap between the Francophone majority and the Anglo minority, and there was the general feeling that they were treated like second-rate citizens even when they were the majority. That changed as the 1960s and 1970s wore on with the rise of "Quebec Inc." and Francophones getting income parity with Anglophones, but it did exist.