The racist right will try to ignore historical realities they don't like to own up to. Genocide may not have been the focus but assimilation certainly was.
Forced assimilation does not appear to be genocide as popularly understood. It is not violent ethnic cleansing via mass murder, etc. The colonial bounty on Indigenous scalps was an obvious historical genocidal strategy: The fact that that bounty is still law in Nova Scotia is a constant irritant to Indigenous people.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4003961/mikmaq-elder-scalping-proclamation/But genocide actually has a broader meaning:
the destruction of Peoples "as such".
Assimilation
intentionally imposed on a group of people by whatever means, is the destruction of a group "as such".
Forced assimilation is clearly a strategy used throughout Canada's history and in the present, to rid Canada of Indigenous Peoples "as such".
The government mandated 'Indian' Residential Schools were the largest and most obvious tactic to turn Indigenous kids away from their culture and assimilate into the mainstream, qualifying as genocide under subsection
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. at the time Canada signed the UN Convention (1952), and continuing for several decades after.
Canada has a persistent reason, and the intent, to finally get rid of the identity as Indigenous peoples ...
because of the land rights they still hold that could never be removed legally, unilaterally, by government and continue to exist today.
The land rights of Indigenous Peoples are a constant frustration to business/industry and governments due to
Canada's resource-dependent economy, increasingly so at this time.
Canada's elected governments have "intent" ... economic intent to gain unimpeded access to land and resources.
Indigenous Peoples know this, and they experience Canada's "intent" to destroy them "as such" in many forms.
Official (police) dismissal of reports of missing and murdered women, the police and societal culture of disparaging them and their families' concerns, dehumanizing them, all are now acknowledged to be "racism" at work. Indigenous peoples experience that racism and marginalization as just another face of the genocide that has persisted and continues throughout Canada's history to date.