Waterloo students unnerved to learn about Canada’s darker past

WATERLOO — Students sat silent and still while Nazi leader Adolf Hitler got in their faces, spewing hate from a screen.

They know who he was. Still it's unnerving to share a bus with him, and watch the murderous rampage his followers unleashed on European Jews in the Second World War.

The sobering lesson was delivered inside a converted RV that has visited 700 schools to teach human rights and tolerance.

But the lesson was only partly about faraway crimes by a foreign regime. Much of it was about how Canada has at times failed itself.

This is a nation that once practised slavery. It interred people of Japanese descent and it turned away desperate Jewish refugees, before and during the last world war.

It forced Indigenous children into residential schools, the last of which closed just two decades ago.

"I always thought Canada was accepting of everyone," said Madi Splane, 13.

"I was really surprised by the fact there were slaves here. I did not know that," said Julia Duarte, 13.

"In school you're not really taught as much about your country and what they did wrong. It's more about what they did right," said Mara Perovic, 13. "It was really eye-opening."

The Tour for Humanity experienced by these students is an educational outreach by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

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