By Michelle Stirling ©2025 with files and input from Nina Green

Since the publication of the book “Start-Up Nation” and the subsequent proliferation of Israeli innovation in virtually all areas of modern hi-tech, bio-tech, agro-tech, etc., Israel was the darling of the world for many years. Bizarrely, the vicious Hamas/Palestinian massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, did not engender global sympathy and support, but was flipped, largely by lazy or compliant media, virulent social media and boots-on-the-ground campus and street activism, to become labelled as a genocide of Gazan Palestinians – even before Israel responded militarily!

Thus, Israelis, and diaspora Jews, are desperate to find some way to rebalance the facts and to secure Israel’s right to the land.

Recently, Justice Harry Laforme spoke at an event at Temple Emanu-El-Beth-Sholom, as reported in the Westmount Independent. Laforme is Canada’s first native appellate court judge and was the first chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, before resigning due to a combination of ideological differences and some personal health issues.

LaForme describes himself as an “Indigenous Zionist.” According to a report in the Westmount Independent of Nov. 18, 2025, he feels that the indigenous experience in Canada closely aligns with that of Israel. LaForme sees Israelis as being the original indigenous people of Israel. In his talk, he strongly advocated for Israel to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a means of supposedly ensuring Israel’s right to the land.

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With Israelis and Jews feeling desperate to find some resolution to the issues of claims of “stolen land” and with Justice LaForme being a friendly voice in a time of great need, people may be inclined to accept his advice.

My advice? Don’t do it.

Based on my research, I warn Israel, Jews and Israeli supporters that adopting UNDRIP would have exactly the opposite impact. Across Canada, “land back” activists in the Indigenous and environmental/climate communities have formed an ideological alliance with the Palestinian cause – “From Turtle Island to Palestine – Land Back.”

In his presentation to the Temple, Justice LaForme claimed that Duncan Campbell Scott used the term “the final solution of our Indian problem” in Department of Indian Affairs correspondence on April 12th, 1910 in reference to Indian Residential Schools.

That claim, which has been made repeatedly for decades by Indian activists, is false. It originated with conspiracy theorist and defrocked United Church minister, Kevin Annett, in his article in the Summer 1999 issue of The American Indian Review. According to Annett, he found the Scott letter in Department of Indian Affairs files held by Library and Archives Canada. The claim has been brought to the attention of Library and Archives Canada many times over the years, most recently during November 2025. Archivists have searched repeatedly for the letter and have never been able to find it because it doesn’t exist. The alleged Scott letter is simply an invention by Annett to bolster his hundreds of other false claims about Indian residential schools.

In fact, Duncan Campbell Scott was an advocate for Indian people. In particular, as established in his comments during the Parliamentary Committee debates of 1920, Scott was an advocate for the enfranchisement and economic independence of Indigenous people. On that occasion he said:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That is my whole point. I do not want to pass into the citizens’ class people who are paupers. That is not the intention of the Bill. But after one hundred years, after being in close contact with civilization it is enervating to the individual or to a band to continue in that state of tutelage, when he or they are able to take their position as British citizens or Canadian citizens, to support themselves, and stand alone. That has been the whole purpose of Indian education and advancement since the earliest times. One of the very earliest enactments was to provide for the enfranchisement of the Indian.

The term “the final solution” attributed to Hitler and genocide is associated with the 1933 Nazi rise to power and the implementation of the Nuremberg racial blood laws of 1935. In other words, people were given preferential or genocidal treatment based on their inherited race. In Nazi Germany of the 1930’s, “the final solution” was a euphemism for eradicating European Jewry.

By contrast, Duncan Campbell Scott’s position was that Indigenous people should be afforded the dignity of supporting themselves when they were in a position to do so, and that when that happened, Canadian society would be alleviated of the burden of financially supporting mass numbers of Indigenous people who once were entirely self-sufficient as hunter-gatherers. The means of bringing about this mutually beneficial state of affairs was education, though which Indigenous people would gain the necessary basic skills at Indian residential schools to permit a “just transition” to the new agro-industrial society.

The few Department of Indian Affairs documents which contain the words “the final solution to the Indian problem” use the term in a very positive sense to which no reasonable person could object. For example, in his report in 1904 on the Anglican-run Battleford Industrial School included in the DIA Annual Report for that year, the Reverend E. Matheson concluded with these comments:

General Remarks. - With reference to ex-pupils, some who returned to reserve life do not make the progress they ought to, or that one could wish for - their surroundings are frequently against them - but these are not all, and we must not expect too much from the first remove from savagedom. Some have their own places and property on different reserves and are doing well. Others again who have not taken to the reserve life are earning their own livelihood amongst the settlers; it might be well for all, or nearly all, of the boys on leaving the school to do this for some years, so as to get a knowledge of the settled life of the country by actual experience. The knowledge of the English language obtained by the pupils while in the school, and their general training and surroundings while there give them a fitness and also an inclination for employment amongst white settlers. Some of our ex-pupils are engaged in various places as teachers or helpers in connection with the Indian schools. One is attending college, studying with a view to taking holy orders. Another has taken his course and is to be ordained to the sacred ministry of the church at the end of this month. Verily the work has not been in vain and surely these are steps towards the final solution of “The Indian Problem”.

I have great pleasure in bearing testimony to the faithful work of the members of the staff in bringing about the good results that are manifest.

I beg to thank the officers of the department for their kind, courteous treatment; it is heartily appreciated and assists very materially in the important work of improving and elevating the Indian.

The context is clear. The solution is education, and then in finding ways to help the students thrive after they’ve left residential school. Matheson is speaking proudly of the fact that once students have acquired the English language and general training, they are then willing and able to find employment in the settler community. He notes that some become teachers or helpers at Indian schools, while others go on to college or the ministry.

Screenshot of a portion of Matheson’s report to the Department of Indian Affairs with references.

To reiterate, Matheson ends with this:

I beg to thank the officers of the department for their kind, courteous treatment; it is heartily appreciated and assists very materially in the important work of improving and elevating the Indian.”

Recall that native people had no written language, did not speak English or French, did not understand abstract concepts like math and arithmetic. In William Graham’s “Treaty Days; Reflections of an Indian Commissioner,” he recounts how they always had to provide five-dollar bills for treaty payments and could never provide a ten-dollar bill for a couple, as the recipients could not understand that a ten-dollar bill was equal in value to two five-dollar bills. Graham was fluent in several indigenous languages and travelled personally across the prairies for Treaty Day payouts.

The “final solution” people advocated for was that Indigenous people could be as capable as Leah Gazan’s great-grandfather had become. Through some twist of fate, Gazan’s great-grandfather, John LeCaine, acquired seven years of education at an Indian Residential School, perhaps admitted by a kindly priest or local agent. LeCaine was not technically allowed to be enrolled in residential school, as he was deemed to be a “half-breed” and was a non-status refugee. Leah Gazan’s great-grandfather John LeCaine, child of the Lakota Sioux refugees who sought asylum in Canada, attended Regina Industrial School from 1899 to 1906, becoming a homesteading settler with a successful farm operation. He was a devout Catholic and helped fund and build a local church. LeCaine also became an internationally recognized historian and author of many stories of the early Wild West and his people. This is an example of the Canadian “final solution” phrase, alleged to be the words of Duncan Campbell Scott, that a refugee Indian became acculturated and fully economically self-sufficient, as well as contributing greatly to his religious community and the national, indeed, global cultural community.

While people may be shocked at the seemingly heartless reference in the quoted statement of Justice LaForme “…responding to the appalling death rate of ‘Indian’ children in ‘Indian’ residential schools and calls for change” it should be remembered that the death rate at IRS was similar to that off-reserve. At the turn of the century, about 1 in 4 people in society died of Tuberculosis. Review the PBS documentary “The Forgotten Plague.”

As historian Robert Carney (father of Prime Minister Mark Carney) wrote in his review of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) report of 1996, “The Commissioners cite the alarming TB death rates of children in school, but do not record those of children on reserves. This may be because the figures were not available. In instances where they were, however, such as for the attendance area of Sacred Heart Residential School at Fort Providence around the same time, the evidence is that deaths of children from tuberculosis were higher at the community level than at the school.”

Indeed, until the 1950s and the proliferation of streptomycin, there was little the government could do to alleviate the TB death rate. While people often claim that “thousands of children died” at Indian Residential Schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission shows that 423 children died AT Indian Residential Schools over the 113 year history of some 139 schools (some count 143 schools; definitions differ).

Robert Carney also noted in his RCAP review that “The fact is that in addition to providing basic schooling and training related to local resource use, they served Native communities in other ways. It would have been fair to acknowledge that many traditional boarding schools, in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.”(bold emphasis added)

This hardly sounds like a genocidal operation.

Certainly, in the early days of IRS, they were the regional medical/social services hub, in the absence of any other resource.

As I have written elsewhere:[1]

Few Canadians know much about their own history. Nor do they understand the superficial method of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The process was cathartic, allowing individuals to express their personal stories. The reports rely on personal recollections that were not subject to cross-examination, nor was there any requirement to present substantiating evidence. We can say that the ~6,000 voices that were heard (about 4% of all those who ever attended Indian Residential Schools) do not represent the experiences of the other 96%.

Many of those positive stories, like that of Pauline Gladstone Dempsey, or her father, Senator Gladstone, recount that they were enriched by their experience and training at Indian Residential Schools.

That many children suffered is evident in the TRC documentation. Compensation payments have been made with little demand for evidence other than that a person attended the school and stated that they were harmed.

However, this does not meet the typical minimum standards for justice in the context of rule of law, where evidence, witnesses, cross-examination and proof are required, but in light of the time passed and the pain expressed by many Indigenous people, the basic judicial standards were waived.

It is no surprise that Canadians are asking themselves, should the real and perceived trauma of aboriginal people deserve to be placed above all the standards of knowledge, trial and discovery that we used to abide by?

Canada is being accused of genocide of Indigenous people, supposedly on a scale similar to that of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. This is a phantom genocide for which there is no list of names of those presumed missing or dead, and no missing persons report which were not resolved in their time.

Human rights champion Irwin Cotler was also part of that evening at Temple Emanu-El-Beth-Sholom. It is curious to me that Cotler did not stand up for Canada and our Charter Right of Section 11 “Presumption of Innocence.” Also on the panel was moderator Éloge Butera, a Rwandan-born human rights advocate. Why did he not stand up for Canada’s Human Rights under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

No one has ever been charged or convicted of genocide in Canada in relation to Indian Residential Schools – except in the press!

As former residential school “thriver,” Tomson Highway said in a HuffPost article, published just after the release of the TRC reports, “You may have heard stories from 7,000 witnesses in the process that were negative,” he adds. “But what you haven’t heard are the 7,000 reports that were positive stories. There are many very successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school.”[2]

So, at Temple Emanu-El-Beth-Sholom you had an Indigenous judge, a human rights advocate and a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, all accusing or affirming by their statements, that Canada is guilty of genocide regarding Indian Residential Schools, completely disregarding the basic presumption of innocence and the requirement of hard evidence over ideology in adjudicating heinous crimes.

This is an atrocity in and of itself!

Sadly, Irwin Cotler fell into the trap of acquiescence to Indigenous romanticism in his reference to “Turtle Island” – this moniker was invented and popularized by white man and 1970’s beat poet Gary Snyder, who Wikipedia reports - “Snyder is of German, Scottish, Irish and English ancestry.”

As for Israel adopting UNDRIP? Don’t do it! The exact opposite outcome will be the result of what you hope for. The “land back” movement has coopted the Palestinian cause.

This news should be very disconcerting to all Jews in Canada – and to all taxpayers. The largely tax-funded Assembly of First Nations has aligned itself with the Palestinian cause under UNDRIP and the “land back” movement want all of Canada’s land back to Indigenous people (see Cowichan Ruling in BC for the first slice of the sausage) and all of Israel to go ‘back’ to Palestinians.

For Montrealers, who are no doubt exhausted and terrified by the on-going street demonstrations, protests, riots and intimidations of the Palestinian/Hamas activists, don’t fall for UNDRIP for Israel; instead, demand that UNDRIP be repealed in Canada.

The recognition of the Palestinian state by Prime Minister Carney and President Macron has been described as “Diplomatic Terrorism” by Belgian jurist Drieu Goddefridi as it defies all precepts of international law: “International law — particularly Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention — defines the criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to engage in relations with other states. Yet neither of the two Palestinian political entities meets these criteria.” This recognition of the Palestinian state by Prime Minister Carney has also put Canadian sovereignty at risk.

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Please read and share my “Open Letter to the Honorable Sean Fraser, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada RE: End Ministerial and Member of Parliament Attacks on Indian Residential School Factualism.”

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Whatever you do, Israel, do NOT adopt UNDRIP. And whatever you do Montrealers, recognize that the present street demonstrations are not ‘just’ about Israel, but about the total destruction of the West. Thus, don’t help them by playing along.

[1] https://medium.com/@UndauntedArtz2/the-forgotten-tuberculosis-plague-residential-school-factualism-is-not-a-crime-faa52182e1ea

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/tomson-highway-has-a-surprisingly-positive-take-on-residential-s_n_8787638