File photo of Louis Riel, circa 1876.CP/The Canadian Press
We hanged Louis Riel on Nov. 16, 1885. It was 125 years ago, and his hanging remains a topic of debate. To pardon or not to pardon: That's the question regularly put to Parliament. A statue on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature, a television re-enactment of his trial, and a T-shirt cartoon of Riel with a noose around his neck all generated front-page press. Why? Why are we still talking about this man?
After all, we have hanged more than 700 people since 1867, including aboriginal leaders, francophones, Catholics and westerners. We even hanged other rebels from the same events that ultimately resulted in Riel's execution. So it's not just because he was hanged.
Why does Riel continue to fascinate us? Possibly because his hanging is one of Canada's few moments of shared memory. I am not a great fan of the search for a shared national narrative. I'm content with Canada's history without stories that are belatedly claimed as events that bound us together as a nation. Anyway, it's clear that the hanging of Riel is not a binding shared memory.
In fact, it shows us our differences by highlighting our major fault lines - French/English, Catholic/Protestant, aboriginal/Euro-Canadian, and east/west. Some of these lines have receded into the background for the time being. The current religious debate of Islam versus Christianity makes the distinctions between Protestants and Catholics seem insignificant. But the other lines of tension continue to dominate public discourse. What Riel did in the late 1800s was to unite all those themes into his person. No other individual in our history has done that.
Riel has become an adaptable legend - martyr, rebel, mystic, poet, statesman, madman, traitor - take your pick and don't worry too much about the facts. He is now claimed to be the first voice of western alienation. He is held up as a religious advocate in the face of our secular regime. His hanging is said to be the moment when the francophone west was lost.
Riel's legend is constantly being reshaped and, perhaps in a bid to make his legend even more adaptable, many have felt the compulsion to cleanse his name. To that end, since the early 1980s, there have been at least a dozen bills in either the House of Commons or the Senate seeking his exoneration. Many of these bills contain long restatements of history. As I already said, I am not a fan of searching for shared memories. I think we should resist legislated ones, and that includes the attempts to posthumously pardon Riel.
Pardons (I mean real pardons, not the after-the-fact smoothing of a convicted criminal's re-entry into society that passes for a pardon under the Criminal Code) are notorious for their ignoble history. Most people believe that a pardon implies guilt, mercy and forgiveness. In fact, a pardon is rarely used for mercy. It is more commonly used for political purposes, and there are some famous historical examples - including the pardon denied to Jesus and the pardon granted to Richard Nixon, who, by the way, seriously considered pardoning himself.
So should we pardon Riel? No. His pardon would not be an act of mercy or corrective justice. The justice of a death penalty cannot be corrected after the fact. If he were innocent or justified in his actions, a pardon for something he was not guilty of rather goes against the grain. So a pardon for Riel would serve only one purpose: It would be politically expedient. He was sentenced and hanged in order to serve the political purposes of the Macdonald government. We should not contemplate a pardon as a way to serve the politically correct purposes of this day. Let him rest in peace.
Jean Teillet, a Vancouver-based lawyer, is a great-grandniece of Louis Riel.