The admonition not to speak ill of the dead is generally wise, though public figures are in a different category.

Murray Sinclair, chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), is in a category of his own. He taught Canada to speak ill of generations of the dead, including its founders, and even to speak ill of Canada itself.

Sinclair, who died on Monday, is likely the most influential Canadian public figure of this century, now a quarter complete. He managed to convince much of Canada’s leadership class — in politics, academia, the churches, the arts, journalism — that the country itself was a criminal enterprise animated by genocidal brutality against Indigenous peoples. So far-reaching has his influence been that the very name and visage of our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, has been removed in several places — including Kingston, his hometown.