A Conservative senator who had previously argued that “some good” came out of Canada’s now-infamous Indian residential schools, was expelled from the Tory caucus after refusing to remove a “racist” comment from her Senate website, Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer said Thursday.
Scheer said in a statement that he had learned on Tuesday that Senator Lynn Beyak had posted approximately 100 letters from Canadians in support of her position on residential schools to her Parliamentary website.
It is estimated that more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were separated from their families and forced into residential schools over much of the last century in a deliberate policy to “take the Indian out of the child.”
More than 3,200 Aboriginal children attending these residential schools died and were often buried in unmarked graves, according to the final report from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which called the policy of forced assimilation “a cultural genocide.”
The Conservative leader said he had asked Beyak to remove one of the letters that suggested Indigenous People want to get things for “no effort” and she refused, resulting in her removal from caucus.
“Promoting this comment is offensive and unacceptable for a Conservative Parliamentarian. To suggest that Indigenous Canadians are lazy compared to other Canadians, is simply racist,” he said.
“As a result of her actions, Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith and I have removed Senator Lynn Beyak from the Conservative National Caucus. Racism will not be tolerated in the Conservative caucus or Conservative Party of Canada,” Scheer said.
In March 2017, Beyak caused uproar after suggesting residential schools were not all bad.
“I speak partly for the record, but mostly in memory of the kindly and well-intentioned men and women and their descendants — perhaps some of us here in this chamber — whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged for the most part and are overshadowed by negative reports,” Beyak said.
Indigenous leaders in Manitoba and northern Ontario were unequivocal in calling for Beyak to quit.
And, in an open letter to Beyak, the Anglican Church of Canada said that whatever good may have taken place, “the overall view is grim. It is shadowed and dark; it is sad and shameful.”
In the Canadian parliamentary system senators are appointed by the prime minister but cannot be removed from their Senate seats by the government unless they resign voluntarily.
Beyak, who was appointed to the Senate by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2013, was expelled from the Senate’s committee on Aboriginal Peoples about a month after her comments on residential schools.
However, even after being expelled from the Conservative caucus, Beyak can sit in as an independent.
With files from The Canadian Press and CBC News
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