Terry Newman: CBC unfairly attacks Carney’s father

The 2025 Canadian federal election campaign is in full swing. During such times, extra attention is paid to candidates and party leaders, which can sometimes include digging up stories about their pasts, which is fair game. But on Thursday, CBC went further than most, resurrecting the ghost of Robert Carney to stand trial for using outdated language in a 1965 interview and his nuanced defense of the residential school system.

But Robert Carney is dead, and can’t defend himself. So, it appears the real reason CBC did this was to call out his son, Liberal Leader Mark Carney, to “speak out and address his father’s legacy.”

The CBC story suggests that Robert Carney, a Catholic educator and federal day school principal’s ties to a day school in Fort Smith, N.W.T., need to be “untangled.” It provides readers with statements from historians and others to suggest he has an “assimilationist” attitude and this legacy is one of residential school “denialism.” The CBC makes an anachronistic assertion using an interview from 1965 to suggest that the elder Carney should have known back then that the term “culturally retarded” would be offensive in 2025, 60 years later.

But the attempt to smear the elder Carney backfired. What Carney’s writings and the interview provided actually suggests is that Robert Carney was a good man, genuinely concerned with both the education of Indigenous children and the maintenance of their cultural pride. There are no allegations that the late Carney ever harmed an Indigenous student. As an educator and principal, he appears to have been beyond reproach.

In fact, he brought to light instances of abuse within residential schools (which were different than the day school he personally worked in). He interviewed 240 former residential school students for a 1991 church-commissioned study, and according to CBC, “report(ed) instances of extreme physical abuse and 15 alleged instances of sexual abuse at eight Western Arctic residential schools.”

The CBC story includes a 1965 interview with Robert Carney about his progressive school program that CBC suggests some might find “jarring.”

The interviewer opens: “Mr. Carney, at the teacher’s conference not long ago, you told about a program you have working at the Joseph B. Tyrrell (JBT) school in Fort Smith for culturally retarded children. First of all, would you define a culturally retarded child for me?”

The word “retarded,” which was used frequently in books and articles at the time of this interview, has since been retired from modern discourse, but for CBC to pretend that the elder Carney here meant anything other than delayed, and not permanently, but temporarily, is a smear.

Robert Carney goes on to explain a term that didn’t seem to shock the interviewer who used it herself — an interviewer from CBC, of all places. Miraculously, the 1965 CBC interviewer escaped the call out to her children to answer for her sin of being complicit in using the same term.

“A culturally retarded child in the context of the Northwest Territories is a child from a Native background who for various reasons has not been in regular attendance in school,” said Carney. “He’s from a language background other than English and who is behind in school, say three or four years. In many centres in southern Canada, the subculture groups, say in the working-class area of a large city, you would have children who you would call culturally retarded.”

By his own explanation, he used the term to explain that, when a child is not attending school regularly, which was often the case even in working classes at the time, their learning progress (adoption of culture) was held back. No implication was made about their cognitive ability.

The elder Carney goes on to explain that the development of the programs he was working on at the time were developed to “meet their needs, to try and upgrade their skills and bring them into contact with the dominant culture.” This would have been, in Carney’s mind, and anyone at the time who believed that all students in Canada should go to public schools for an education, was the right thing to do. Attaching malevolence to this goal is a luxury of future judges.

Carney explained to the CBC host why he believed these programs were needed, that many of the students coming to the schools from northern communities were “behind in school three, four, five, and six years,” he said. “So we established a number of classes, which we have given the name special classes for want probably of a better word, and these classes are structured in such a way that the academic skills that are so important, to any child living in the 20th century, that these skill are taught in an appropriate manner.”

People may also bristle at Carney’s use of the word “special” here, but it’s clear no harm was intended.

Carney stressed that only those children who were significantly behind would be in the special program, would be transferred to the regular one as soon as they were ready, and that many Indigenous children were, in fact, in the regular program.

Elder Carney’s educational program was progressive in many ways. He wasn’t even a fan of using the word “grade” and instead preferred transferring students as soon as they reached a new level, letting a child move at their own speed. He was very proud of that fact that he realized a ratio of one teacher to fifteen students as opposed to one to forty in other schools was preferential for both the students and teachers. He also believed that teachers should be a specialist in a subject rather than a generalist.

Listening to the elder Carney’s tone and goals, I’m reminded of a speech Mr. Rogers gave in 1969 to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, requesting funding for his show and public broadcasting. Like in Mr. Roger’s speech, Carney’s passion for children’s education in the 1965 CBC interview was palpable.

Carney told the interviewer: “We want them to be able to read. We want them to be able to speak English. We want them to be able to do the various operations in arithmetic. We want them to know about the world. We want them to know about the world of science. We want them to have the opportunity of expression in music and art. We want them to learn various skills in physical education and so on.”

Carney was adamant that the students keep their Indigenous pride and was not adamant that they stay in the day school system:

“But at the same time, we want them to not forget their origins, or not to forget their backgrounds, and to instill in them a sense of pride and a sense of belonging that the culture from which they come is a good culture, and if they do go back to the old way of life, they go back with skills which will help them in the old way of life.”

Despite Carney’s beliefs stated in the interview, CBC’s Thursday story cites Trent University’s Jackson Pind, referring to Carney’s views as “assimilationist.” The CBC links to a blog Pind and two other historians wrote about Carney’s “legacy” which they suggest includes “residential school denialism,” at term which they define as “the twisting, downplaying, or minimizing of truths related to residential schooling to protect church and state and the colonial status quo.”

Despite noting that Carney “earned a PhD in Educational Foundations from the University of Alberta,” “wrote many articles about the history of schooling in the Northwest Territories,” and “served on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Native Education,” actions most reasonable people would attribute to someone genuinely well-meaning and interested in Indigenous education, the academics suggest Carney’s motivations were questionable.

Carney, you see, as a professor and department chair, “often spoke positively about Indian day and residential schools.” This, no doubt came from his own lived experiences.

These professors suggest this Mr. Rogers-like educator’s problematic nature didn’t end there. They suggest he should not have criticized a book titled, “Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School,” by Celia Haig-Brown that they refer to as “ground-breaking.” Carney’s criticism: It focused too much on trauma. They do not mention whether he had anything positive to say about the book.

Most of all, the historians whose blog CBC linked, appear to be most concerned with Carney’s review of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ report, suggesting that Carney “dismissed” it when he criticized it as “being one-sided.” They complained that Carney’s “sentiments were in opposition to what Survivors were telling Canada about their experiences of being institutionalized at residential schools.”

But if you read the review, Carney does no such thing. He just highlights what’s missing in terms of context, which could, very well, in a scholarly-distanced tone, seem cold to some. Here’s what he does say: “This is clearly a slanted account of these institutions, and therefore should be viewed cautiously because, to cite one of its problems, it tells only part of the story.” He continued, “The phenomenon of Aboriginal residential schooling is too complex and requires considerable nuance.”

He was right.

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