It's 'Dead Wrong' for Canada to call residential schools genocidal

The cost to this nation of 'living within the lie' is incalculable. Yet, not one shovel has hit the ground in Kamloops, B.C.

In his widely-praised Davos speech, Mark Carney paid homage to a renowned 1978 essay by Czech dissident Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless.” In it, Havel tells the parable of a greengrocer who refuses to place a “Workers of the World unite!” poster in his window, symbolizing his personal dissent from a totalitarian regime’s extortion of rote public mantras nobody believes as a tool for mind control.

In taking this quietly gutsy stand, the greengrocer moves from “living within a lie,” like his conforming peers, to “living within the truth,” setting such an impressive example that Mr. Carney appropriated moral kinship with the greengrocer in his declared defiance of certain scofflaw “hegemons.”

But one needn’t go abroad or back in time to find brave metaphorical greengrocers.

Since May 2021, a small, courageous band of honorable Canadian historians, independent researchers, teachers, politicians, lawyers and journalists have refused to put their “sign in the window” affirming — without evidence other than the vague suggestion of soil anomalies which have not been confirmed through exhumation, though $12.1 million was allotted for the endeavour — that 215 Indigenous children died in illicit circumstances and were buried near the former Kamloops, B.C. Indian Residential School.

The cost of “living within the truth” — that we currently have no evidence that these are unmarked graves or that a genocide occurred — has been high for them including jobs lost, book deals cancelled and social media “denials” swarmings.

The cost to this nation of “living within the lie” spawned by the “215” meme — that Canadians are collectively guilty of genocide — is incalculable. Well-intentioned people who worked at these schools, who cared for these children, like Prime Minister Mark Carney’s father Robert, have suddenly become complicit in the unproven accusation.

Yet, not one shovel has broken ground on the Kamloops First Nation to confirm these claims. So far, the $12.1 million has not been completely accounted for. But it seems to have been spent on things like marketing and communications, travel, trauma counsellors, and security — everything but exhumation equipment and professionals.

This isn’t just about the government funding for digs that haven’t happened, although that’s bad enough. If there are unmarked graves of children, they should be returned to family members and given a proper burial.

Dorchester Books and Truth North recently released their latest book, “Dead Wrong: How Canada got the residential school story so wrong.” With a mix of returning and new contributors, it is a sequel to their 2023 anthology, “Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools).” Apart from the National Post, Grave Error received no mainstream media coverage, yet achieved best-seller status. Its success proved there was a real hunger for objective treatment of the costly ($216 million for grave searches 2021-25) and demoralizing millstone of Canada’s residential schools’ legacy.

In her preface, Dead Wrong’s publisher, Candice Malcolm, speaks of the “moral panic” that from the outset, with a May 2021 report of “soil anomalies” near Kamloop’s former residential school, quickly morphed into the “215 unmarked graves” narrative that was immediately etched in stone. Most mainstream journalists accepted the declaration without demur. By investigating and sharing her findings with readers, Malcolm eventually lost her column in the Toronto Sun. She didn’t care. “I knew I was right,” she wrote about questioning the unproven accusation.

The book’s crisply diagnostic introduction was written by Dead Wrong’s editors, Chris Champion, publisher of the Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Research Group. Their executive summaries of Dead Wrong’s contents — the full gamut of this moral panic’s negative spin-offs, which included church burnings, the extremely high-risk Land Back movement, and an error-riddled, but lavishly celebrated propaganda “documentary” Sugarcane — offer a tantalizing glimpse of the follies unleashed in the name of “reconciliation.”

While the scholars that contributed to Dead Wrong deserve our respect and gratitude, it is because they have dedicated their working lives (and beyond) to Indigenous studies and they are inherently motivated to defend their research and professional honour. I was therefore pleased to note the ample attention also paid in the book to non-stakeholder Canadians, innocent citizens for whom a few minutes’ compliance with an unproven accusation could have saved them a world of trouble, but who stuck to their guns on principle and reaped the whirlwind: B.C. Conservative Party politician Dallas Brodie; high school teacher Jim McMurtry; B.C. lawyer Jim Heller and Quesnel B.C. accountant Pat Morton. Their detailed stories make for riveting, but — trigger warning! — infuriating reading.

Suffice to say what happened to them is a sobering reminder that the totalitarian instinct isn’t always accompanied by a hammer and sickle. It can also be found in democratic societies that pay lip service to freedom of speech, then repress it under the guise of empathy for the cultural equivalent of the “workers of the world.”

In his chapter, “Residential Schools were no Atrocity. Look at the evidence,” pre-eminent colonialism authority Nigel Biggar addresses Canada’s “national scandal,” the “atrocity” tale that became “a false public orthodoxy.” Biggar assigns blame for its pertinacity: to the academics who knew the data was misrepresented but failed to offer corrections; to the journalists and editors who declined to ask questions; to the politicians “who tied their careers to the mendacious narrative”; and especially to those who persecuted skeptics to the point of destroying reputations and careers, even (here he names NDP MP Leah Gazan, the worst of the lot) “pressing for the totalitarian criminalization of ‘denialism’.”

Living with the truth, like charity, should begin at home. A good start would be an all-party endorsed annulment of the all-party endorsed resolution in June, 2021, that Canada’s residential school program constituted a “genocide” (“ongoing,” in Justin Trudeau’s view, thereby implicating all living Canadians as génocidaires), since the claim itself has not been, and may never be, proven, if progress on exhumations to date is any indication. One has to ask, where does that leave the “truth” part of “Truth and Reconciliation”?

The resolution deserves annulment because it was the fruit of a tree poisoned by activists’ unseemly haste in elevating “soil anomalies” to child homicides. If it isn’t annulled, and the blood libel of genocide remains as an official stain on this nation’s record, the promised day of “reconciliation” will never arrive. Reconciliation will continue to be just another woke “sign in the window,” obediently posted by meek Canadians, that nobody believes.