In support of giving Louis Riel a pardon

The National Post yesterday accused Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff of historical revisionism when it comes to Louis Riel. Mr. Ignatieff has recently announced that he is a supporter of the movement to give the 19th century western rebel a pardon for his conviction of treason. The Post thinks that this is mere pandering and that Mr. Ignatieff is either ignorant or intellectually dishonest. The Post’s article, on the other hand, reads like a propaganda speech by Dalton McCarthy, the anti-Catholic politician and contemporary of Louis Riel. There is a complete lack of balance displayed in the historical perspective of the National Post.

The grossest mischaracterization of Louis Riel and his rebellions came in this sentence:

Riel had also attempted to unfairly distort the land-claims process in order that his own Métis people might receive the majority of land being offered by Ottawa to native people.

No one was trying to distort anything, except for the federal government. The Métis people had settled the land in what is modern day Saskatchewan. They had cleared it with their own hands and they relied on the food that it produced for their survival. Then the federal government came to ‘survey’ the land and assign block allotments to settlers.

That is to say, the government was stealing their land.

And this is not just an abstract idea of the value of property rights. The federal government was threatening the survival of the community and causing starvation. The North-West Rebellion was a desperate act of self defence.

No one can claim that the Métis and other natives didn’t try other means than violence to resist the government. Native leader Chief Big Bear and others spent a decade petitioning the government and peacefully protesting their treatment. They were completely ignored by the political establishment in Ottawa. What choice was left them?

As much as we all deplore violence, we must remember the context of that violence.

The National Post also brings up the murder of Thomas Scott. This murder took place during the Red River Rebellion, and all participants in that rebellion received an amnesty. This amnesty included killing Thomas Scott. So as much as the National Post would like to resurrect the ghost of the dubious Thomas Scott, it is unjust to offer amnesty one year and then execution the next. If he was executed for the murder of Thomas Scott, it was an unjust conviction.

The primary issue of Riel’s trial, however, was not Thomas Scott but the more recent history of the North-West Rebellion. It was certainly a crime for Reil and his followers to take up arms against the government, but it was a crime against tyranny. Usually Canadians, as a freedom loving people, celebrate such a crime.

I will conclude with the words of Wilfrid Laurier:

His whole crime and the crime of his friends, was that they wanted to be treated like British subjects and not to be bartered away like common cattle. If that be an act of rebellion, where is the one amongst us who if he had happened to have been with them would not have been rebels as they were?