Canada’s Chief Archivist has embarked on a mission to remove everything offensive from Canada’s historical archives. And yes, she gets to decide.
Internal emails show Canada’s head archivist ordered the removal of thousands of national archives she deemed “offensive.”
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Access to Information records show that Leslie Weir, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief archivist at Library and Archives Canada, ordered staff to scrub more than 7,000 pages of historical records from their online database, citing that the content “may offend people.” …
Included in the so-called offensive content that has since been deleted were essays “celebrating” Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, articles from French explorers who left out the “Indigenous perspective” of events, and Northwest Mounted Police content that lacked “diversity” or lacked “language to explain the diversity” of the time.
One of the problems the archivists are experiencing is exactly what you’d expect.
[T]he only instruction by Weir was the broad request to remove anything that could be deemed “offensive” content. “Do we have a definition [of what constitutes offensive content]?” one manager asked. “This is not the way to do this,” a colleague retorted.
“This is not the way to do this?” What way is If you don’t mind my asking?
The problem is not knowing what to censor. It’s that some random bureaucrat can define for the people of an entire nation (and the world) which bits of their history we are entitled to review.
Based on what they find offensive?
No one doubts that it was written by the victors of conflicts or contests or that it is slanted by the culture or notions of time and space and all of that.
How are we not replicating that offense by doing the very thing these modern censors insist upon in the name of the latest point of view. And what right do they have (in the name of Diversity) to constrain information until the only thing left is what conforms to their worldview?
The act itself is as arrogant and misplaced as the thing they claim to be correcting.
Acts no less offensive than those these liberals would swear they oppose: when a religious sect or faith bans or prohibits material based on some social-cultural perception of the moment.
Let history remember Leslie Weir, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief archivist at Library and Archives Canada, for what she is and is doing.
Oh, and how about a few more people acting offended at what she’s doing to history.
