Two vocal spokesmen for Leah Gazan’s proposed legislation to criminalize “residential school denialism” — Niigaan Sinclair and Sean Carleton — have co-edited a book published in September 2026. In it, they have denounced people like me, Tom Flanagan, Frances Widdowson, and others as “residential school denialists” while they repeat their claims that Canada committed genocide with residential schools.So perhaps it would be a good idea to find out exactly what they regard as “residential school denialism.”Sinclair and Carleton tell us exactly what it is in the many interviews they have given on the subject.Here is one of the interviews Sinclair gave to CBC shortly after the Kamloops graves announcement in 2021. A report had been made that 751 graves containing residential school students had been discovered at Marieval, Saskatchewan, near the Cowessess Indian Reserve. Here’s a summary of the claim Sinclair made to the visibly shaken CBC host..Seven hundred and fifty-one residential school students at Cowessess had been the victims of a monstrous crime. The Catholic Church had caused the deaths of 751 innocent indigenous children, and then deliberately removed the headstones from the sites to hide their graves from discovery. This was proof that the deaths were not just from neglect on the part of the church, but a deliberate crime. The church not only withheld documents about all this but very deliberately covered up the crime so that Canadians could not find out what happened at the schools. This showed — in Sinclair’s legal opinion — culpability and criminal intent..The key, he opined, was not just about the massive amount of criminality that happened at the schools; it was about a level of criminality that proves genocide. Sinclair opined that there were hundreds more — even 1,000 — of these crime scenes — just like Marieval and Kamloops — in Canada.Sinclair was quite eager to agree with the gullible CBC interviewer when the interviewer asked about the children who had been “murdered” at the schools. In fact, Sinclair went on to claim “murder” at the 100 to 1,000 sites like Marieval and Kamloops that he insisted existed all across the country.He claimed in that interview that he had given other interviews and detailed all of this shocking information to many German, Al Jazeera, and other international journalists who sought Sinclair’s wisdom about these astounding claims. In Sinclair’s opinion, he was performing a great service by explaining to the world how Canada had been committing a genocide on Aboriginal people by perpetrating the crimes at Marieval, Kamloops, and throughout the land..There are other similar interviews as well. Here’s one. In them, Sinclair adds detail and opines that there were 25,000 victims at the 100 to 1,000 crime scenes, like Marieval, that he described. He alleges “outright murder” and “tremendous amounts of death” at the schools..There are also deleted Facebook posts where Sinclair waxed so eloquent that he decided it might be best to take them down.I saw them when they were up, and they repeated these sensational allegations with even more lurid detail.To recap, Sinclair accuses the Catholic Church of committing what would be by far the worst crime ever committed in this country.The problem with all of this, of course, is that Sinclair was speaking complete nonsense. The alleged crime scene — the cemetery at Cowessess, where he says 751 poor indigenous students were killed and secretly buried, with a dastardly Catholic Church removing the headstones to hide its enormous crime — was pure fiction. .Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme carefully clarified that the site was not a mass grave, but rather an established cemetery where individual grave markers had been intentionally removed. According to community elders and survivors, a Roman Catholic priest removed the headstones and wooden crosses in the early 1960s following a dispute with the community, leaving the graves unmarked for decades. [1, 2, 3, 4]Simply put, this was just an ordinary cemetery. Indigenous people were buried there. So were non-indigenous people. Children were buried there. So were adults. Sinclair was misinforming the Canadian public on a massive scale. His entire speech about a cover-up of a major crime by the Catholic Church was a figment of his overwrought imagination. He was making this up. No crime had been committed there. People from the community who died had been buried there — rather standard fare for a cemetery. The headstones had been removed as a result of some kind of dispute within the community.There had been no conspiracy by the Catholic Church to cover up a crime because no crime had been committed. The 100 to 1,000 similar “crime scenes” and the “25,000 victims” described in the “stories in the community” that Sinclair relied on to make his fantastical claims were just that — stories.The same was true at Kamloops and elsewhere, where claims about priests killing children and secretly burying them “with the forced help of six year olds” were being recklessly made with promises of government millions to follow.As for Carleton, he has been beside Sinclair every step of the way, backing up Sinclair’s claims. There was not a peep from Carleton after Sinclair’s massive misinformation about Marieval was exposed. Instead, he preferred to denounce scholars and writers who did not accept Sinclair’s claims as “denialists.” Neither Sinclair nor his co-editor Carleton ever apologized to the Catholic Church, the federal government, or the Canadian people for Sinclair’s irresponsible accusation..Interestingly, Carleton warned people to disbelieve a well-known story circulating on the internet that Queen Elizabeth had kidnapped 10 students from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. .What Carleton did not tell his followers was that the kidnapping claim was invented by the same residential school “survivor”, William Combes, who was famous for making up stories about priests killing children and forcing their six-year-old friends to dig their graves. Combes was featured in the fabulist Kevin Annett’s “documentaries”, including his famous Unrepentant.By specifically telling followers to disbelieve the Queen kidnapping tall story, Carleton, by implication tells them to believe Combes’ other whoppers.He also initially spread the “mass grave” fake news, and then abruptly pivoted and indignantly denounced anyone who mentioned the term..So Sinclair and Carleton co-edited a book published in September 2026 and self-righteously claim that Canadians who refuse to believe their version of the “unmarked grave” narrative are “denialists” and should be prosecuted. Exactly how many Canadians profess to believe that the Catholic Church covered up 751 murders, 215 at Kamloops, and 25,000 more across the country, as Sinclair alleges, is not known. There are probably some. But I would hazard a guess that the overwhelming majority of Canadians would regard Sinclair’s deeply anti-Catholic slander as quite deranged. So, if the government is of a mind to act on Sinclair’s claims as per MP Leah Gazan’s recommendations, and criminalize all those Canadians who disbelieve what Sinclair is claiming, it had better build a lot of prisons.Sinclair and Carleton have built their careers on these false claims of tortured, murdered, and secretly buried indigenous children. Their goal appears to be to convict their own country of a genocide it didn’t commit. They have already done great damage by having nations, like communist China, denounce Canada as genocidal. Anyone who gets in their way is to be denounced as a “denialist.”The fact that these two fellows have the temerity to falsely accuse the Catholic Church and Canadian government of what would be the worst crime ever committed in this country, repeat this accusation to an international audience, and then co-edit a book promoting themselves as paragons of truth, while accusing eminent scholars, like Professor Tom Flanagan, of being “denialists” might be funny if these false claims hadn’t resulted in churches burning, internal division, and damage to Canada’s international reputation since 2021. It is chutzpah on steroids.We — the people they condemn as “denialists” — will not let them get away with their brazen assault on the truth.
