hEyOkA mAgAzInE

I enclose certain materials including my letter to you dated January 7, 2008 concerning my son, the Reverend Kevin D. Annett, the atrocity of the “Religious Schools” run by all of the major church organizations of Canada for more than 100 years, and the outright complicity of the Canadian government – until now.

Not surprisingly, I have not as yet received a reply or acknowledgment from you or any of the legion of functionaries you employ in the PMO. Herewith I am trying again, largely because of the most recent outrage in this long litany of crime against humanity.

Steve, I am entitled to address you in this matter. My family has fought and died for Canada since 1825. Captain Robert Annett of the Irish Fusiliers, the first of my family to come to Canada, served with Wellington at Waterloo and married the daughter of John Dunning, Lord Ashburton, author of the Ashburton Treaty that settled sections of the boundary between Canada and the United States.

My father, Ross Annett, limped all the years of his adult life because of a German bullet he took at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Entitled to a pension, he refused to accept it, simply because he believed other veterans were more in need. His was an ancient belief that serving one’s country did not require compensatiuon.

My brother, Robert I. L. Annett, at the age of 19 a sub-lieutenant and gunnery officer on the destroyer H.M.C.S. Athabaskan, was killed when his ship was sunk off Finisterre in 1944.

But of all of those seven generations, sir, my family is most proud of my son the Reverend Kevin Annett, who has served Canada with distinction in the most noble fashion. His service will never be recognized with the Order of Canada , with tribute or with the publicity so dear to the hearts of politicians, ward-heelers and the insiders who abound in Ottawa .

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He has merely, single handedly, sought justice for a subjugated people. In doing so, he has risen above unbelievable persecution by the United Church (which sought and is still seeking to trash his life and his reputation for exposing its crimes). He was punished by the University of British Columbia by the refusal to accept his Ph. D. thesis (because he challenged the legality of its principal benefactor). The RCMP has verbally and physically intimidated him for no particular reason except that it takes its marching orders from the establishment. The media has remained bored and indifferent.

Finally, you, sir, and your government, until very recently ignored this man you should have supported, until at last, mostly because of the pressure this one man generated, you grudgingly abandoned the denial of more than a century and have now offered a tepid, bureaucratic acknowledgment of the genocide and other crimes in the form of an “apology.”

I read the account of your apology, delivered yesterday in Parliament, constantly restraining the urge to throw up. Did you give any acknowledgment to the one man whose selfless work for 15 years was almost wholly responsible for your sudden abandoning of your government’s historic denial? No. Did you once mention the villainy, the greed, the tax-free effrontery of the United Church , the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church of Canada ? Hell, no.

Rather, you have appointed a farcical “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” first of all borrowing legitimacy with the proselytization of Nelson Mandela’s and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s commission of that same name a decade ago. Doesn’t work, Steve. Their Commission ended apartheid officially, and they both received the Nobel Peace Prize. This creature of yours makes no sense, because it is cobbled together primarily as a vehicle for the churches not only to escape retribution but to emerge looking like altruistic altar boys.

To indicate how phony this quasi-permanent Commission really is, imagine if, following World War II, there had been created a “TRC” composed of Adolph Eichmann, Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler, with a Jewish collaborator thrown in to make it look good (as in the current case, the Association of First Nations’ Super Chief as poster boy). This body, endorsed by General Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, would then have been funded by the Allies with a bottomless budget to travel all over Germany and “publicize the work of” the Nuremberg Tribunal. Isn’t politics wonderful?

Only in Canada .

I forgot to mention your niggardly compensation package for those children, now adults, who were sodomized, raped, tortured and medically experimented upon, provided they sign a release promising to shut up forever.

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Ten grand apiece. As one Skid Row victim in Vancouver remarked: “Just enough to get drunk on before committing suicide.”

That $10,000 compares unfavorably with the $1.1 million granted each victim by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles , along with its unconditional acceptance of responsibility (Something unknown to Canadian churches). In other words, the value of the suffering of one shattered native child is assessed at 1% that of each abused California altar boy.

Only in Canada .

Between Captain Robert Annett in 1825 and Sub-lieutenant Robert Annett in 1944, for more than a century, my family essentially lived in rural Ontario, staunch Tories who read little but the Bible and the Globe and Mail. I’m sure most of them would be proud of your government.

That’s where I part company with my ancestors.

S/ William Annett

P.S. There is a committee with members in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto Montreal, Boston, New York, Boulder, Colorado, New Orleans and Daytona Beach, which is continuing its campaign to have the Reverend Kevin Annett nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The beauty of the Nobel Institute is that it is a singular organization that doesn’t give a tiddly damn about silly national governments that apply expensive, meaningless band-aid solutions to monumental problems and dismiss profound humanitarian issues by shuffling them off into misguided, self-serving bureaucratic “Commissions.”

Steve, I submit that my son Kevin has done you a personal service in providing you with an unprecedented cause celebre, considerable ink and vast political mileage. As a modest acknowledgment, a Nobel nomination or endorsement from the PMO or a member of your government (say, Chuck Strahl) would serve, like the tired joke about drowning lawyers, as “a good beginning.”