“Residential School Mass Grave Mania”

On May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced the supposed discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at a Native American residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Specifically, Chief Rosanne Casimir claimed the discovery of the “remains of 215 children.”

Canada convulsed in horror. Flags were lowered to half-mast for five months straight. One First Nation group after another came forward claiming they had discovered hundreds more unmarked graves. At one site in Saskatchewan where it was claimed 751 children had been found buried, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau placed a teddy bear in memorial of the children. The government threw $320 million into a “Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund.”

Canada’s residential school hoax is making us world famous.

Exactly five years ago last weekend, the man now known as Mr Katy Perry — but then known as the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau — ordered that the flags be lowered to half-mast on all Canadian federal buildings. This was out of respect for the indigenous children who had died in the country’s residential schools that were government-funded and run by Christian churches from the 19th century to the late 20th century. Thousands of unmarked graves for those children had just been discovered, it was reported, forcing the country into, to use the lingo of the time, a racial reckoning. Horrifying claims emerged: that priests had beheaded children; that nuns had forced children to bury babies; that during a 1964 visit to Kamloops Residential School, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had invited children on a picnic who were never seen again.

On May 30, the Globe and Mail editorial board issued a mea culpa, titled “There is no reconciliation without truth,” attesting to the newspaper’s failure to meet professional standards on an important national story. Ironically, for a piece centred on journalistic shortcomings, this defensive editorial not only itself contains significant journalistic shortcomings, but fails to deliver the only conclusion that merits genuine approval.

To begin with, I want to thank Real Story subscribers for their patience. As I mentioned on Victoria Day, my absence from the National Post and from this newsletter over the past while was due to the work required in putting together a 3,000-word assessment of the damage done by the mass psychosis that afflicted this country on the last weekend in May, 2021.

It’s out now. Some of it may come as a bit of a shock, although perhaps not to paying Real Story subscribers who read this newsletter’s contents beyond the occasional paywalls.

In the past five years, the Survivors’ Secretariat in Six Nations has acquired over 36,000 records related to children who attended the Mohawk Institute Residential School, according to secretariat lead Laura Arndt.

The Survivors’ Secretariat, a non-profit survivor-led organization, has been investigating the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont., Canada’s longest-running residential school, since 2021.

Arndt said despite accessing thousands of records through archives using access to information requests, privacy law restricts them from sharing those with families of survivors or lost children.

Five years ago Canada was sold a narrative so emotionally charged that it changed this country for the worse.

Truth has been twisted out of proportion, people’s lives have been devastated, hundreds of millions of dollars wasted and all based on a spurious investigation that hoodwinked the nation.

A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.

This is the Globe piece – Where the truth is buried in Tk’emlúps

It’s been five years since the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced that it had discovered hundreds of unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., using ground-penetrating radar (GPR). The announcement sent shockwaves throughout Canada and brought the residential school controversy to global attention. Then prime minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags flown at half-mast at all federal buildings and they remained lowered for more than five months, the longest period in Canadian history. But in the years since the announcement, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc has walked back its initial claims about graves at a former Kamloops residential school. Here’s what we know about Canada’s graves controversy.

May 27 of this year will be the fifth anniversary of the shocking announcement that the unmarked graves of 215 missing children had been found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. But the announcement turned out to be a nothing-burger. On the third anniversary, the band’s leadership admitted that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had found only “soil anomalies” that were “potential” graves.