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Dear Joe:

You don’t mind if I call you Joe, do you? I mean, I know you’re president of the United States and all, but I feel like we’re close.

Joe, you seem to have forgotten that I worked for you, for months. Even though I was way up here in Trudeaustan, unable to cross the border, I volunteered for you.

I was with you when you were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe, and everyone except me said you were going to lose. I worked for you when you defied all the nay-sayers, and won the nomination.

For months, Joe, I worked the phones for you. From my little farmhouse up here in Prince Edward County, I’d call voters all over the States for you. New Hampshire to Florida to California, and myriad points in between. I’d call, Joe. For you, big guy.

Did the voter need a ride to a polling station? Did they get the advance voting package from the town clerk’s office? Did they double-envelope it, and sign it, and mail it back? Were there any questions I could answer?

Hundreds and hundreds of calls, Joe. I did that for you. Because I have believed in you way back to 2008, when that young senator from Chicago picked you to be his running mate.

I have never doubted you, Joe — partly because you so reminded me of my former boss, Jean Chretien. But that’s a column for another day.

Anyway, Joe, since you became president, I’ve been good. I didn’t complain too much when you killed the Keystone pipeline, even though your country and mine both need it.

I didn’t gripe when you wouldn’t let COVID vaccines be shipped from America to Canada (we got a lot of ours from Europe and India).

But the border thing, Joe. I can’t let that one go.

This week, our toy prime minister announced that Canada would be welcoming fully vaccinated Americans starting Aug. 9. You? You sent out your press secretary to sniff that you wouldn’t do likewise. Said she: “I wouldn’t look at it through reciprocal intention.”

Seriously, Joe? Reciprocal intention? I mean, is reciprocal even a word? (It is, Kinsella. – Ed.)

OK, it may be a word, but it’s no way to treat your best friend and ally. We’re letting your fully-vaxxed folks in: why can’t you let in ours?

It’s not fair. It’s not scientific. Most problematic of all: it’s put me in a situation where I have to say something nice about Justin Trudeau and something critical about Joe Biden! (Told you, Kinsella. — Ed.)

Joe, your fellow Democrats in Congress want you to let us Trudeaupians in. So do Democratic governors and state legislators. So do chambers of commerce. So does everyone down there, with the possible exception of the GOP, which is as good a reason as any to let us in.

Look, Joe, we know you have a political problem. The Mexicans want the border reopened, too. But your predecessor, the Mango Mussolini, made the U.S.-Mexico border a hot topic. We get it.

So open it just to us, Joe. You have nothing to fear from Canadians. Even our hockey teams can’t beat yours.

I worked for you, Joe. I shed blood, sweat and tears for you. I believe in you, Joe.

But I need you to open up the border to us, big guy. If not for Justin, then for me.

I’ve got a Red Sox game at Fenway to get to, Joe, and I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.

Yours faithfully, your humble volunteer,

Warren

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The High Aryan Warrior Priest of Canada stirred.

“Jesus wasn’t a Jew,” he said, without blinking.

It’s a sunny, warm spring 1986. I’m a reporter for the Calgary Herald, now a Postmedia newspaper. Along with award-winning Herald photographer Larry MacDougal, I’m in the Caroline, Alberta kitchen of Terry Long, the then-recently-anointed leader of the neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Nations.

Larry and I have spent hours with Long, listening to him describe Jews as “the spawn of Satan,” non-whites as “mud people,” and Adolf Hitler as “Elijah the Prophet.” Seriously. With a straight face.

When the interview was done, and Long’s words were safely preserved in my tape recorder, I decided to challenge him.

“Mr. Long, Jesus was always Jewish and a rabbi,” I said to him, as Larry looked at me, wide-eyed. “And the Holocaust is a notorious historical fact.”

Long didn’t haul out one of his many firearms and shoot us, as Larry later told me he expected. Instead, Long almost seemed bemused by what I was saying.

He went into his family’s cluttered living room and returned with a “bible,” one published by the Aryan Nations. In it, he patiently explained, Jesus Christ was in no way Jewish. And the Holocaust did not happen, in any way, shape or form, he added.

“There’s proof,” he said. In other words, if historical facts don’t conform to your prejudices, then simply conjure up new proofs. Write your own bible, create your own history.

That’s what Terry Long did — and Jim Keegstra, and Ernst Zundel, and every other Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi leader I ever interviewed, too. They denied, dismissed and debated the Holocaust, to whitewash the crimes of Hitler and his regime.

And they created a Jesus Christ who wasn’t ever a Jew. Because the Messiah couldn’t be the “spawn of Satan,” then.

That’s what the experts blandly call historical revisionism. And it is underway in this country, right now. But not about Christ or the Holocaust.

It’s about what really happened inside those so-called residential schools. And what is buried in unmarked graves behind them.

Denying Indigenous children and babies are found in those graves — or, if they are in those graves, that they all died of natural causes. No crimes were committed, in other words.

That’s historical revisionism — in the current context, it’s denial of what is almost certainly cultural or literal genocide. It’s a disturbing trend, and this writer has seen it growing in recent days.

On social media, in comments underneath columns like this one, alongside articles about the increasing number of unmarked graves being discovered: The deniers are out there, patiently denying history. They’re relentless.

Is it to whitewash the sins of Sir John A. Macdonald? To excuse the Liberals, whose party was in power for most of the years in which residential schools operated? To subtly (and not so subtly) express contempt for the pain of the Indigenous community?

The reasons vary. The methodologies, too. But the effect is the same: To deny history. To sanitize the misdeeds and the crimes of the past.

It needs to stop. The residential schools existed. More than 100,000 Indigenous children were forced into them. Thousands died. And some — hundreds? thousands? — did not die of natural causes. (Why bury them in unmarked graves, then, if not to hide wrongdoing?)

Debate is good. Dissent is good. But denying terrible misdeeds — when there is proof of those misdeeds — is a terrible, terrible thing to do.

To both the living and the dead.

— Warren Kinsella was a Special Ministerial Representative for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs

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