Tom Flanagan: Apologizing for slavery would be a distortion of history
One of the first petitions to Canada's new Parliament has landed, and the topic is slavery. Endorsed by Gord Johns, an MP from British Columbia who managed to survive the recent NDP annihilation, it demands an apology to Black-Canadians from the Government of Canada: 'Black Canadians have endured centuries of systemic racism, beginning with transatlantic slavery, followed by legalized segregation and ongoing institutional discrimination in policing, education, employment, housing, health care and the justice system.… The Government of Canada has yet to formally apologize.'
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With only 125 signatures so far from a country of 40 million people, the petition is not exactly a milestone of populist politics. Nonetheless, the issues it raises are worth clarification.
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The institution of slavery was not brought to the New World with the arrival of the European settlers. Slavery had been practised since time immemorial over most of North and South America. When the French arrived in what is now Quebec, they brought a few African slaves with them by way of their Caribbean outposts, but mostly they purchased Indigenous slaves from the Iroquois, the Illinois and other far-ranging tribes. These slaves became known as 'Panis,' after the Pawnee tribe of Nebraska that furnished many of the captives.
The noted historian Marcel Trudel has estimated that, prior to 1760, the Panis made up two-thirds of all slaves in New France. Africans afterwards became more common, but overall numbers remained relatively small. New France lacked the plantations and mines that were worked by millions of slaves in Latin America, the American south and the Caribbean, so slaves were mainly personal servants and craftsmen.
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After the Conquest, more African slaves were brought in from the United States and the Caribbean, but the English conquerors also imported the philosophy of abolition, then starting to make headway in England and its colonies. In 1793, the Government of Upper Canada (now Ontario), under the leadership of Gov. John Simcoe, passed the Act Against Slavery, outlawing the importation of slaves, one of the modern world's first anti-slavery statutes. In contrast, slavery was not abolished in the British Empire until 1834, in the United States until 1865 (with the end of a bloody civil war) and in Brazil in 1888. Far from being a mainstay of slavery and the slave trade, Canada was a leader in its abolition.
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