Senator Murray Sinclair smiles as he waits for an interview to begin in the foyer of the House of Commons in Ottawa on April 12, 2016. Sinclair was the living embodiment of one of the greatest challenges facing Canada – reconciliation.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The lives of great people can be too easily reduced to a list of their accomplishments, even if those accomplishments are as groundbreaking and important to Canada as those of Murray Sinclair.
Mr. Sinclair was one of the first Indigenous lawyers in Canada and was named Manitoba’s first Indigenous judge in 1988. He led two critical public inquiries in Manitoba, one into Indigenous people’s experiences with the province’s justice system and the other into the deaths of 12 babies at a Winnipeg hospital. He went on to become the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2009. He was named to the Senate in 2016, sitting in the upper chamber until 2021 and somehow finding the time and energy to also be lead investigator for a report into systemic racism in the Thunder Bay Police Services Board.
But the legacy of Mr. Sinclair, who died on Monday, isn’t reflected in his deeds alone. There is so much more to the man born on St. Peter’s Indian Reserve in Manitoba in 1951.
Through the example of his life and work, he was the living embodiment of one of the greatest challenges facing Canada – reconciliation. And through the strength of his extraordinary character, he became the conscience of a country wrestling with its ugly past.
Mr. Sinclair was raised by his grandparents in a manner that taught him how to combine traditional teachings with the institutions of non-Indigenous Canada, the Roman Catholic Church in particular. As a young lawyer, he faced discrimination from judges who looked down from the bench and assumed he was the accused. His work on the two public inquiries in Manitoba showed him how Indigenous people suffered at the hands of systemic racism, building in him a determination to fix those wrongs.
His subsequent work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed the horrors of residential schools. But instead of using those findings as a cudgel, he wisely turned them into an opportunity for the country to heal.
“We see Mr. Sinclair’s brilliance in the fact that he took a process which could have been very divisive and could have split Canadians apart, and instead he used it as a tool to forge calls to action to bring all of us together for the future of this great country,” Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said this week.
Mr. Sinclair insisted reconciliation would take time, perhaps as long as two generations, and that education was the best way out of what he called “this mess.” He urged Canadians to learn from each other. He told anyone who would listen to love even those who do not love them back.
Those who saw Mr. Sinclair speak said he did so with an authority and wisdom that commanded attention. It was a voice that carried over to his many social media postings, such as those on life and grief that were being widely shared this week.
His baritone voice could also turn to thunder when he was confronted with prejudice, such as when someone would ask him why Indigenous people didn’t just get over the crime of residential schools and move on.
“My answer has always been, Why can’t you always remember this?” he said. “This is about memorializing people who have been victims of a great wrong. Why don’t you tell the United States to get over 9/11? Why don’t you tell this country to get over all the veterans who died in the Second World War, instead of honouring them once a year?”
As Mr. Kinew said this week, “He showed us that there is no reconciliation without truth.”
It was thanks to Mr. Sinclair’s lifelong fight for truth and justice that Canada now has an annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, one of the commission’s 94 calls to action. There is also a direct link between the commission’s efforts and Pope Francis’s 2022 apology for the church’s involvement in the “deplorable evil” of residential schools.
But true reconciliation will only be achieved when Indigenous people have the same opportunities as everyone else. There has been progress, but many First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are still far behind the general population. There is still much inequality and prejudice to overcome.
Too often, too, politicians use the word “reconciliation” as a prop, without living up to the responsibility that Mr. Sinclair imbued it with.
With his passing, Canadians must honour his legacy by continuing his work until the job is done, with patience, love and resolve.