Jonathan Kay: Why, exactly, is Mike Harris being accused of making a racist remark?
| You can tell that the editors at The Toronto Star weren't happy with Sidney Linden's official Ipperwash Report. For years, Star columnists, like many Ontario pundits, have been operating on the assumption that Mike Harris must somehow have blood on his hands for the 1995 killing of Dudley George — just as they (falsely) tried to pin the Walkerton tainted-water deaths on the then-Premier. But the Ipperwash report explicitly found that " he folks at The Star grimly persevered with the bad hand dealt to them by Linden, however. Yesterday, they ran a front page feature titled , whose title is self-explanatory. Among the disconnected snippets that columnist Ian Urquhart pastes together to make his case against Harris was an off-colour remark alegedly made by Harris shortly before the killing: "I want the f---ing Indians out of the park," a comment many (including Linden himself) claim is racist. I agree the comment sounds bad. But is it really? The term "Indians" itself may have been out of favour by 1993 — but it certainly isn't racist by itself. The term "f--ing Indians" would be racist if the obscenity were interpreted as a reflection of the premier's opinion of Indians in general — or even, arguably, if he were offering his general opinion of the sort of Indians who are wont to stage illegal occupations of government parks. But to my mind, Harris was simply speaking in anger — as government officials presumably often do when they're trying to deal with a stubborn standoff with criminals. It is just as easy to imagine Mr. Harris saying, for instance, "I want the Indians out of the f---ing park," or "I f---ing want the Indians out of the f---ing park," or "I f---ing want the f--ing Indians out of the f---ing park." None of these statements would indicate that Harris was (1) Anti-parkist, or (2) self-loathing. So why should his alleged original statement be seen as racist?
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