Randy Crosson is the Executive Director of Freedoms Advocate, freedomsadvocate.ca, a Canadian charity that supports constitutional and human rights litigation.Survivor accounts of residential schools vary — sometimes from the very same person. Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell told Nunatsiaq News in 2001 that her time at Akaitcho Hall was "a home-away-from-home" and that "it's not like what you're hearing about all the residential school issues today." In the same piece, she said, "At Akaitcho, we were in a structured environment compared to where we came from. That taught us perseverance and how to discipline ourselves." "It taught us a lot about doing things in life that we didn't always want to do, but those things had to be done ... We had to learn how to live with people from different cultures who spoke different languages and came from different parts of the NWT," she continued, adding that those friendships helped her political career.Twenty-five years later, it was the same senator, now describing herself as a residential school "survivor," who stood in the Senate and introduced an amendment to Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, that proposed making residential school "denialism" a criminal offence.On June 3, the Senate voted 41-32 against it, even though the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights had recommended it 7-1 two days earlier. Government representative Pierre Moreau told the chamber why it failed: no consultation with First Nations and Inuit communities, and no legal analysis of what the amendment would actually do.The Assembly of First Nations didn't let it go. On July 15, chiefs at the AFN general meeting in Ottawa passed an emergency resolution demanding the government try again. Chief David Monias called it a matter of honouring survivors. Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige said the history "isn't up for debate," arguing hate-speech law is needed so denialism can no longer "prey upon survivors, their families, or our people." NDP MP Leah Gazan has a private member's bill on the same subject sitting in the Commons since 2024 — this fight isn't over just because the Senate voted once..Section 2 of the Charter protects freedom of conscience, thought, belief, opinion, and expression. These rights exist for ideas that authority finds inconvenient, wrong, or threatening. A right that only protects approved opinions is not a right — it's a permission slip.Give government the power to declare one historical interpretation criminal, and you've given it the power to declare any interpretation criminal. That power doesn't stay confined. Every future government inherits it. Every future controversy becomes a candidate for prosecution.History gets rewritten as evidence changes and records surface. That's the job. A law that freezes today's conclusions and criminalizes tomorrow's revisions doesn't protect history — it kills the practice of doing history.Take the graves question. Ground-penetrating radar surveys at former school sites have flagged thousands of anomalies since 2021, starting with the 215 at Kamloops. Almost none of those flagged sites have been excavated and forensically confirmed to actually contain human remains..Kimberly Murray, Canada's former special interlocutor on unmarked graves, defined denialism broadly in her 2024 report as not just denying the schools existed, but "misrepresenting the intent, outcome, and impacts" of the system. That's the definition on the table, and it's worth asking what it actually covers. What counts as "minimizing" an event? Who decides where academic disagreement ends, and criminal minimization begins?The Criminal Code is supposed to tell citizens exactly what will land them in prison. "Downplaying" and "minimizing" do the opposite — they let prosecutors decide after the fact whether your opinion was a crime. That's not law. That's discretion wearing a badge, and discretion this broad always lands hardest on the unpopular and lightest on the well-connected.Canada already has laws against harassment, intimidation, and the willful promotion of hatred. Those cover conduct that targets real people. Disagreeing with an official historical narrative isn't that, and pretending otherwise is how speech laws metastasize.The answer to an argument you hate is a better argument, not a subpoena. If a historical claim is as strong as its defenders believe, it wins in open debate. If it needs the Criminal Code to win, that says something about the confidence of the case, not the guilt of the dissenter.The Senate had it right in June. Moreau's objection — no consultation, no legal analysis — was really a polite way of saying the same thing this piece is arguing outright: nobody had actually worked out where the line falls, because there isn't one that can hold. The AFN will keep pushing, and Gazan's bill will probably come up for a vote eventually.When it does, Parliament should give it the same denial the Senate already did.Randy Crosson is the Executive Director of Freedoms Advocate, freedomsadvocate.ca, a Canadian charity that supports constitutional and human rights litigation.
