Robert Carney was a day school principal who cared about Indigenous education

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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 But on Thursday, CBC went further than most, resurrecting the ghost of Robert Carney to stand trial for using outdated language in a 1965 interview and his nuanced defense of the residential school system.

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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........

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