Canada's chief archivist
Leslie Weir personally ordered content and webpages she deemed “offensive” to
be rewritten or removed from the national archives altogether. Weir was appointed in 2019 and makes close to $250,000
annually to preserve and protect the national archives.
“We need
to discuss having a disclaimer on the website about having content that may
offend people,” Weir wrote in a June 9, 2021 staff email. “I feel very strongly
about that.”
Weir
described the need to censor as an “urgent situation.”
“Much of
the content on the Library and Archives Canada website reflects the time at
which it was written,” said Weir. “We understand much of this outdated
historical content no longer reflects today’s context and may be offensive to
many.”
Access to
Information documents obtained by independent news site Blacklock's Reporter showed confusion and objections to
the purge coming from Library and Archives Canada staffers.
“This is
an enormous undertaking with over 7,000 web pages,” wrote Weir.
The
subjective nature of the memory-holing of historical data confounded employees,
as shared by Blacklock's:
“Leslie has asked for us to remove
all offensive content from the website. We are scrambling today to identify
what that might be.”
“We are going to be doing a more
thorough search of offensive content on all our platforms,” emailed one
manager. “The only direction we received from Leslie was ‘offensive content,’”
said another.
“Do
we have a definition?” asked a manager. “This is not the way to do this.”
Some of
the censored or altered content was in relation to First Nations and Indigenous
material, including historical figures involved in residential schools.
Though
it's not entirely clear why Weir went on the censorship tear, it was previously
reported by Blacklock's that
Weir took a Communist Party-sponsored junket to China right after being appointed to the
national archives.
The
September 2019 trip featured Weir as a guest of the National Library of China in
a celebration of “socialist culture.”
The Beijing conference was held
only weeks before Communist
Party librarians admitted to book burning.
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Affirmative action at its best, folks! And all this on International Women's Day. The archives are supposed to preserve Canadian history, not re-make it. Nazi book burning anyone!? This is complete insanity and is the result of native lobbying, I learned. Great work and congratulations to all involved!
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