Globe digs itself even deeper with mea culpa about Kamloops coverage
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National Post
- June 7, 2026
Defensive editorial about significant journalistic shortcomings was flawed itself
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.
In the first paragraph, they admit that they wrongly accepted as true the 2021 allegation of “unmarked graves” near the former Kamloops, B.C., residential school without a shred of evidence to back up the claim. Fine. But in the very next paragraph, they state: “3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
Not true, according to Nina Green, an independent researcher whose website Indian Residential School Records is a documentary treasure trove on this issue. For many years, it has been Green’s regular habit to send mass emails to politicians and journalists across Canada, including the Globe, correcting the errors she finds in their reportage. With attached receipts, of course. (The Globe has never responded to them, Green tells me.)
In her latest missive, which unpacks the Globe editorial, she writes that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) claimed no such thing. The TRC states that 423 named children died “on the premises” of a residential school, or 832 when the named and unnamed registers are combined. Which amounts to 832 children “out of the 150,000 children alleged to have attended the 139 schools over a period of 133 years” — a little over six deaths a year in the entire residential school system.
For another error, the Globe editorial states that an unnamed “government official” in the early 1900s considered deaths at residential schools to be the result of negligence so pervasive it “came unpleasantly close to manslaughter.” But the source was not a government official. Toronto judge and reformer Samuel Hume Blake wrote a pamphlet in the form of a letter to the Minister of the Interior in January 1907. His subject was not the residential schools, but the “lack of sanitation in Indian homes on reserves” that led inevitably to tuberculosis.
Blake wrote: “(D)oing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.” (My emphasis.) Amongst other recommendations, Blake called for the establishment of clinical centres with trained nurses to give instruction to Indian women and children “in the ordinary hygienic rules — the non-observance of which cultivates tuberculosis and scrofulous affections — principal causes in the high death rate.” The Globe’s error turned beneficence into wickedness.
Many Canadians now feel they have been gaslighted for five long years. Not just by the Globe and the CBC. With the exception of the National Post and independent media like Rebel News, True North, Juno News and the Dorchester Review, Canadian journalists as a whole showed virtually no curiosity regarding a story absolutely riddled with implausibilities. For example, Kamloops always had Indigenous staffers. They would have been aware of these alleged burials. Yet we are to believe there wasn’t a single whistleblower amongst them in all these years? No missing-child reports filed by families whose children allegedly never came home from school? Please.
The consequences of choosing advocacy over journalism have been dreadful: aside from 100-plus burned or vandalized churches (including two deaths) and a marked rise of anti-Catholicism, we have also seen a heavy price paid by honourable scholars who voiced their evidence-based skepticism from the get-go. Misleading media endorsements have been largely responsible for trivialization of the Holocaust and a race for supremacy in virtuous distancing from “denialism” amongst professional associations, school boards and universities, not to mention cabinet ministers.
It is because of these harms, intimately connected to media dereliction of duty, that I believe the Globe editorial should not have been written by the board, but by the editor-in-chief, David Walmsley, at whose desk the buck stopped on how the Kamloops story should be framed. And the final words of that editorial should have been the announcement of his resignation.
For this was not just a sorry-we-goofed error in need of correction. Chief Roseanne Casimir asserted, in a resolution put forward at a July 2021 meeting of the Assembly of First Nations, that “the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous peoples.” Yes, she said “mass grave” — implying it was a horrific massacre — and nobody in the media said boo. That’s a blood libel of priests and nuns and missionaries who aren’t here to defend themselves.
Worse, the allegation was directly implicated as motivation for an all-party Parliamentary resolution recognizing the residential schools as a “genocide.”
The Kamloops fiasco has changed this nation for the worse. Canadians were made by their government to feel shamed, demoralized and bitter in being labelled génocidaires. The breadcrumb trail from these feelings leads directly to the media. Sorry, but a head must roll for that. Reconciliation? When First Nation leaders join other Canadians in calling for an annulment of the genocide resolution, we will know that the reconciliation process has begun.
National Post