Aaron Gunn, Residential Schools and the Meanings of Genocide

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - In a series of tweets between 2019 and 2021, the Conservative candidate for North Island Powell River, Aaron Gunn, argued against the the idea that residential schools were a form of genocide.  In the first of these he agreed that they were ‘truly horrific events,’ but added that people should not refer to them with a loaded word like ‘genocide’ that does not remotely reflect the reality of what happened.” He was wrong, residential schools are a perfect example of genocide.

Mr Gunn’s understanding of the term appears to be limited to ‘killing of a large number of people,’ but when Raphael Lemkin coined the term he stated it wasn’t necessary to kill people. There were also genocides of political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups.

Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer who fled from his native Poland after the Germans overran it in 1939. He was deeply concerned about NAZI Germany’s extermination policy.
In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), Lemkin wrote: 

“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
He added that. “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain upon the territory …”

Lemkin also coined the term cultural genocide, which is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements that make one group of people distinct from another. 
How does this relate to Aaron Gunn’s Tweets?

These three appear to be misguided: 
“There was no genocide. Stop lying to people and read a book …”; 

“I understand that people have a misinformed view of history which they have reached following a steady and persistent attempt to discredit Canada’s past in order to undermine its institutions and future.” 

“Residential schools were asked for by Indigenous bands in Eastern Ontario when John A MacDonald was still a teenager.”

This last remark refers to residential schools in eastern Ontario sometime between 1828 and 1835, when John A MacDonald was a teenager, but according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the purpose of residential schools changed during the 1870s.

“With the passage of the British North America Act in 1867, and the implementation of the Indian Act (1876), the government was required to provide Indigenous youth with an education and to assimilate them into Canadian society.”