Not like the Conservatives deserve benefit of the doubt either. Conservatives under PM Harper drafted, negotiated and signed the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement which effectively surrendered Canada's sovereign rights to China. Real patriots.

In one sense it doesn't really matter if the treatments aren't that much more effective. Endless money didn't help Steve Jobs survive his second fight with pancreatic cancer.

Here's a word: "crime". Stealing and murder are both crimes. One is magnitudes worse. Doesn't change the fact that stealing is by definition a crime.

The term "genocide" is actually less than 100 years old, but the agreed-to UN conventions since 1951 includes the following under Article II which are not directly-inflicted physical harm:

> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; > > (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; > > (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Despite what you think, describing as genocide the treatment of our indigenous peoples is exceedingly accurate.

China is especially quick to trot out our treatment of indigenous people, past and current, whenever their treatment of Uyghurs is brought up.

As if that whataboutism excuses their own actions. And at least our government is honest enough to publicly admit to the world we were and still are in the wrong. As Canadians we may not be as good as we once thought we were, but acknowledging our wrongs (which a patriot is capable of) is still loads better than denying an issue even exists (which is what a nationalist does).

I'm mid-40s. I don't remember being taught it in school, but did watch a dramatization on CBC as a teen in the 90s, which ended with text saying the last residential school was only closed a few years before (even that may have been wrong, IIRC the text said the last one closed in the late 80s, but the year we're now given is in the 90s).

That said, awareness does not equal comprehension, and it's only in the last decade that I began to comprehend the true generational trauma and heartbreak that indigenous peoples suffered.

Genocide is not a binary condition, there's a scale and while it's not as obvious or inhumanely atrocious as the two you mention, what happened at the schools is definitely further along that scale than you think.

Reparations for internment of Japanese Americans is nowhere near the same level as admitting treatment of indigenous peoples as genocide. The latter is what the US will never admit to, is the OP's point.

Also, since you think reparations are such a simple gesture that absolves the sins of previous governments... when will descendants of African American slaves see their reparations? All I ever see in response to that are dismissive excuses like "it happened over a century ago, not to you / I'm not personally responsible for it / too complex", etc. The US will fully convert to metric before they ever pay out appropriate reparations to the Black community.

There's a reason the Harper Conservative government officially re-named the "Ottawa River Parkway" to the "Sir John A Macdonald Parkway" a decade ago, just as it was seeping into the larger public awareness that he was not worthy of being commemorated.