CORMAC McCANN – Reconciliation asks for consistency between belief and action
If kindness is a principle, it has to include those who were harmed
When land is taken and cultures are dismantled through systems of colonial violence, the question of responsibility doesn’t disappear, it deepens over time. Reconciliation is not a gesture of goodwill; it is a basic ethical requirement when harm has been done on a structural scale and continues to shape present realities.
What stands out in Canada is the tension between values that are widely taught and values that are often not practiced. Many settlers grow up with what might be called “Sunday School rules”—simple but profound teachings about kindness, honesty, humility, and treating others as you would want to be treated. These are not complex ideas. They are foundational moral expectations in much of Christian teaching and broader civic ethics.
And yet, in the context of Indigenous-settler relations, those lessons are often set aside. They get replaced by discomfort, denial, defensiveness, or selective memory. The moral clarity of those teachings is too often abandoned when it requires confronting what colonization actually did — and what it continues to do.
Throwing out those “Sunday School rules” is not always intentional or conscious.
It happens through systems, institutions, and inherited narratives that normalize injustice. But the result is still the same: a gap between stated values, and lived reality, especially when it comes to land, history, and responsibility.
Reconciliation asks for the opposite posture. It asks for consistency between belief and action.
If kindness is a principle, it has to include those who were harmed. If honesty matters, it has to include the full truth of how this country was built. And if moral teaching means anything at all, it has to extend beyond comfort and into accountability.
Without that, “rules” remain just words—applied selectively, and too often absent where they are needed most.
Cormac McCann ... is a writer, commentator, political organizer, and visual and graphic storyteller whose work sits at the intersection of politics, culture, and community. An eco-socialist, he advocates for a society grounded in collective well-being, democratic participation, and ecological responsibility, with a deep commitment to freedom, self-determination, and robustly representative governance.
Whether through political analysis, editorial work, or visual communication, he strives to make complex ideas accessible and to support movements working toward justice, equity, and collective liberation.