"Sorry State"

Canada has long been a model for those caring and enlightened folk who think that social engineering, judicial activism and frequent breast-beating are the only guarantees of a decent society.

Self-government and treaties for "First Nations";  a formal apology to members of indigenous "stolen generations";  a sense of remorse for having previously lauded the British heritage at the expense of more worthy traditions -- all come with the warm and fuzzy "Tried and Approved by Canada" stamp.  But is there any down side to Canada's earnest desire to demonstrate its goodness to the world?

It depends on your point of view.  Canada always seems to be teetering on the verge of national break-up, which could suggest that its policies are not quite as successful as its boosters claim.  On the other hand, the disintegration of Canada would probably be seen as moral progress by those who believe that talk of national integrity is simply a cover for denying the legitimate rights of minorities.

Unfortunately however, it now looks as though the "Canadian model" may also harm the interests of even the most virtuous elements of that nation of sorry-sayers.  In last week's issue of the English magazine, The Spectator, Mark Steyn writes that the Anglicans and other major Canadian churches face bankruptcy because of legal actions against them for their previous practices of "cultural genocide" directed at indigenous peoples.

Of course, "cultural genocide" is a slippery concept, covering anything that displeases contemporary opinion makers, while excluding attempts to suppress customs which they find disagreeable.  Thus making Christianity or Western civilisation seem attractive to indigenous children is "cultural genocide", but preventing their parents from making money out of the largely traditional practices of hunting whales or seals is seen as reasonable, because hunting upsets conservationists and animal rights activists.

The current troubles of the Canadian churches stem from their involvement in the system of residential schools which were first established in the nineteenth century to educate indigenous children and assimilate them into Canadian society.  Four mainstream churches -- Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics -- ran these schools under contract to the Canadian government until the late 1960s, after which the government began to transfer control to Indian bands.

Government and church guilt about the residential schools grew mightily in subsequent years, keeping pace with the growing idealisation of the spirituality and wisdom of indigenous cultures.  Allegations of physical and sexual assaults also began to surface.

Some of these claims may well be true, for residential schools -- whether for impoverished indigenes or the scions of aristocrats -- tend to foster such abuses.  Nevertheless, cynics have also argued that the clerics were not as sexually active as the numbers would suggest, and that many allegations are the result of memories adjusting to the incentives of fashionable crusades.

In 1993 the Anglican Archbishop Michael Peers gave a fulsome apology to Canada's indigenous people, proclaiming that by trying to assimilate them, "We failed you.  We failed ourselves.  We failed God".  Obviously fearing that a single abject apology might not be taken seriously, Archbishop Peers and his colleagues repeated these sentiments on many later occasions.

It was a great invitation to sue.  And after the Federal government of Canada issued its own apology in 1998, large numbers of "residential school survivors" -- as Anglican officials blithely call them in an attempt to conjure up real holocausts -- began to oblige.  As law professor Ian Hunter recently observed in the Toronto-based National Post newspaper, "the Anglican Church is unique in Canadian legal history in apparently convicting itself from its own mouth and apologising its way into a legally untenable position".

About 10,000 individual lawsuits have now been launched against those involved in the residential schools, with the numbers continually growing.  Not all specifically name the churches;  but where the Canadian government has been sued on its own, it has sensibly sought to bring in the relevant church as a third party.  Some Anglican dioceses face damages claims totalling billions of dollars.

Last month the General Secretary of Canada's Anglican Church, Archdeacon Jim Boyles, attempted to address his flock's concerns about the financial future of the General Synod and individual dioceses.  "From a public policy point of view", he said, these fears were "mostly beside the point".

He went on to explain this surprising assessment:  "Our complaint is not about bankruptcy.  It is about the litigation-based response which, in our view, will guarantee that many plaintiffs die before their suits are settled, that the compensation they ultimately receive will be dwarfed by the costs of litigation, and that the adversarial and exacting nature of the legal system -- which provides compensation for some actions, but denies it for other, equally harmful actions -- make it impossible to redress the wrongs of residential schools through litigation".

Commentators ridiculed this statement as sanctimonious humbug.  Mark Steyn and Professor Hunter both interpreted it to mean that Archdeacon Boyle's only regrets were that some plaintiffs would die before collecting their loot, and that the plaintiffs could not be compensated for every one of the church's past misdeeds.

But I think that the church's critics are being too harsh.  There is something honourable about an organisation that is willing to accept the consequences of its self-assessed guilt and face its own impending bankruptcy with such calm.

There is a lesson here for our own churches.  After all, in some ways they are even more culpable than their Canadian counterparts.  Sir Paul Hasluck, who was Minister for Territories in the Menzies Government in the 1950s, noted that the policy of removing mixed race Aboriginal children from the Northern Territory to southern institutions originated with the Christian missions, and was strongly promoted by churches in metropolitan centres.

So instead of demanding that the nation's taxpayers bear all the costs of compensating the victims of the "stolen generations", perhaps Australia's righteous churchpeople could follow the "Canadian model" and willingly embrace their own financial oblivion.

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