Revisionist "decolonization" & outright lies: slavery, emancipation and ironies

Bonus: Journalism is said to be "the first rough draft of history." Who's writing that draft these days?

True stories or state-enforced mumbo jumbo. Choose.

I had a good chunk of real estate in the National Post weekend edition and online over the holiday Monday known West of the Rockies as British Columbia Day: B.C. doesn't need to atone for its origins. It should be of some interest to all Canadians who are curious about our history, and to American subscribers as well. Do read it when you’re done here.

During the height of the Civil War, Americans were greeted at dockside in Victoria by a regiment of Black men, in uniform, with guns.

In part, it’s an homage to B.C.’s first governor, Sir James Douglas. He was an “octoroon,” to use a strange term from his time, because he was the son of Martha Ann Ritchie, a “free coloured woman” from Barbados and the Scottish merchant John Douglas, a Glaswegian. James’ wife, Lady Amelia Douglas, was the daughter of a Swampy Cree woman and a Connolly from Lachine, Quebec.

I could have described Douglas as the intellectual and moral superior of any of Canada’s founding fathers, or any of America’s, for that matter, but it’s not my intention to disparage the “great men” of history here. It’s enough to know that Douglas, a fervent abolitionist, should be understood as the equal of Abraham Lincoln.

The Post piece is also a tribute to the legacy of the thriving, mixed-race, multi-confessional community of loyalists who founded the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, which Douglas stoutly defended during his years as governor there. This was quite some time before the multiculturalism that is imagined as an invention of Pierre Trudeau and an even further remove from its weird “diversity” mutation, fetishized by his son Justin.

It’s a story that should astonish and delight Canadians unfamiliar with it. If you’re interested in books that tell you amazing things you didn’t know, I strongly recommend my friend Daniel Marshall’s Untold Tales of Old British Columbia, mentioned in the Post piece. It’s coming into its 15th week atop B.C.s bestseller list and it’s in 7th place in Amazon’s top 100 Canadian books.

Approaching B.C. Day I tend to wrench myself away from my usual beat - geopolitics, revolution, war and democracy’s long retreat across the face of the earth - to dust off a tribute to Sir James and Lady Amelia, and to the peaceable kingdom they ruled. My Post essay is an indugence of that habit. For deeper background, see: The British Columbia that might have been. See also Canada: Not something to apologize for.

Under Douglas, Vancouver Island was the last outpost of civilization, pluralism and the rule of law in what remained of the old Columbia Territory, a vast area that was transformed into a hellscape of hideous racism, war and genocide after 1846. That was the year the Americans sequestered the Columbia Territory’s southern half, with the connivings of the British Colonial Office.

It was the event that made it necessary for Sir James to annex the New Caledonia mainland north of the 49th parallel in his unilateral declaration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, in 1858. I may have left National Post readers hanging by describing the establishment of B.C. as one of history’s ironies. I’ll come to the irony below, if it wasn’t clear.

The Treaty of 1846 also presaged the tragedies of 1866, when Vancouver Island was subsumed into the Crown Colony of British Columbia, and of 1871, when B.C. was swallowed by the Dominion of Canada.

Confederation was ultimately worth it, I will reluctantly insist on conceding.

There was a damned high price to pay for these history-making manoeuvers, a price paid mostly by the Indigenous people who had been contentedly welcomed into Douglas’ “commonwealth,” which they had reciprocally welcomed into their homelands. B.C. was pulled into Canada, mostly to indulge the commercial ambitions of Ontarians who were conscious of the lucrative prospects of a Canadian dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Even so, Canadians need to rediscover their spines in defence of this country’s highest ideals and heritage before it’s too damn late.

Setting aside just for the moment the absolute wreckage Trudeau’s Liberals have made of Canada’s immigration system, and to say nothing of the shambles of Canada’s economy and the condemnation of younger Canadians to lives without families of their own and without a roof over their heads they can reasonably afford. . .

By all means, yes, let’s have good faith disputes and spirited disagreements about the meaning of Canada and Canadian history.

But what we’re up against is an hysterical, American-inspired neurosis that has been imposed on Canada by our own own prime minister, and by Justin Trudeau’s vast bureaucratic thought-police infrastructure. You couldn’t have settled on a more effective nation-destroying strategy if you tried.

For more about Trudeau’s destructive nonsense: The real story of the Komagata Maru. More, from our old comrade Michael Petrou: The harm done by Justin Trudeau’s apology to Italian-Canadians might require an apology of its own.

And more below.