It is difficult to decide which of the revelations arising from the actions of Sen. Lynn Beyak is the most disturbing.

Is it that an appointed member of the Red Chamber, the Upper House of Parliament modelled after the British colonial system, refuses to remove five racist letters about Indigenous people from her taxpayer-funded website?

Is it that, after the quiet release of the Senate Ethics Officer inquiry report on March 19 saying Beyak breached sections of the Senate’s ethical code by posting racist letters on her website, she has refused to comply with the officer’s recommendations?

Or is it that she is even allowed to be a senator?

Ethics Officer Pierre Legault asked Beyak to take down the letters, issue a public apology and then get cultural sensitivity training.

She has refused to do all three. By doing so, she is essentially giving her middle finger to the system.

The hateful letters are still on her website.

They’re full of the usual vitriol, repeating the old mantras such as “Indians milking the system” and how “the endless funding pit of reserves have to stop,” that people have to “work for money.”

It’s beyond belief that someone with Beyak’s viewpoints has been left to spew her own twists on reality. “There is no racism in Canada,” she told Legault, according to page nine of the inquiry report. She also argues that if she felt the letters were racist, she would not have posted them in the first place.

If you didn’t know, Beyak is the Indian residential school apologist who believes the schools weren’t all that bad and that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — which found that at least 6,000 children died in the schools — could have done a better job focusing on the positives.

Imagine what it is like for former commission chair Sen. Murray Sinclair, who collected 6,500 stories from survivors and witnesses, to sit in the same room as Beyak.

First Nations leaders and organizations have been calling for the senator’s removal for years. She is from Dryden, Ont., an area once surrounded by residential schools. She represents an area that disproportionately experiences the trauma of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, high youth suicide rates, and nearly 50 years of government neglect after a mercury spill in the English and Wabigoon river systems poisoned the residents of Whitedog and Grassy Narrows First Nations.

Her presence in the Senate shows Canada’s long colonial blindness.

Her job is to be a spokesperson and advocate for all the people she represents — not just those who sent scores of letters to her website. The letters of support, she said, came in after she gave a speech in March 2017 on how to use a “wiser approach” on spending taxpayer money on Indigenous people.

First Nations leaders and other people calling for her to be kicked out of the Senate have their own letters of support. A petition for her ejection has nearly 5,000 signatures. Organizations that have publicly stated she should go include Grand Council Treaty #3 representing 28 communities of 25,000 people in Northwestern Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski-Nation (NAN), which represents another 49 communities of 45,000, and the Thunder Bay Indian Friendship Centre.

According to the Senate’s website, each of Canada’s 105 senators “use their lifetimes of expertise to ensure Parliament acts in the best interests of Canadians.”

Beyak’s presence in the Senate is a very sad statement for the country, NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler says.

Appointed a Conservative senator in 2013 by then-prime minister Stephen Harper, she was a member of the Senate’s standing committee on Aboriginal Peoples before being removed from it after March 2017. She was later also removed from the Conservative caucus, after leader Andrew Scheer found out about the racist letters on her site.

First Nations leaders have complained about her for at least two years.

“I can’t believe we are still talking about her,” Fiddler said. “So much time has passed since we first became aware of where she stands on Indigenous issues. I don’t know what she is doing for our region in terms of her advocacy.”

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It is nearly impossible for senators to be removed. To do so, a collection of senators must come together and start an expulsion process. One was underway for Don Meredith after his affair with a teenage girl came to light. However, he walked away from the Senate before they could eject him.

What happens next for Beyak?

The Senate’s ethics committee, made up of five senators, met on March 21 for an in-camera, or secret, session on Legault’s report.

The committee now must meet again to review the report, give Beyek a chance to defend herself, and decide what, if any, punishment she will face for breaching the ethics code.

The next meetings should not be in secret. A sign of good faith would be to let all of Canada listen in and observe what the Senate decides to do with this senator.

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