Article content continued

It is nothing like that simple. Indeed, repealing Section 43 was a rather odd thing to include among the TRC’s recommendations in the first place.

Of course many aboriginal children at the residential schools were spanked — spanked if they were lucky. If the horrors chronicled in the TRC report under the heading “discipline” had been inflicted upon white children, it is safe to say society would have been appalled. Parents would have availed themselves of the luxury of finding another school. Indeed it was bad enough that on many occasions the schools’ overseers, while hardly opposed to corporal punishment per se, objected strenuously to its brutal and random application at the residential schools.

In 1934, principal J.P. Mackey of Shubenacadie, N.S., decided to get to the bottom of some missing money by having the school carpenter, Edward McLeod, construct “a seven-thonged strap” and deploy it against 19 students, drawing blood in some cases, in hopes of exposing the guilty parties. It made the news, and was scandalous enough to lead to an inquiry, the adjudicator of which concluded Mackey “should be commended and congratulated for carefully investigating the conduct of his pupils.”

Obviously we have no need of new legal restrictions on such behaviour. It is a thousand miles past reasonable force. We are talking about banning spanking as a standardized punishment for misbehaviour, followed by a hug; or spanking as a reprove for younger children’s dangerous behaviour. Implemented literally, a “spanking ban” would criminalize the panicked mother who swats her toddler after he runs into traffic for the third time in an afternoon — and at a point in history when parents continue to abandon spanking in droves, all on their own.