We’re in a dark place in Canada. I honestly thought that we had turned a corner on the freedom to state what is demonstrably true. As we recall, for a while, there was a woke enthusiasm for stating your pronouns. Indeed, one of our smarter intellectuals, Professor Jordan Peterson, left the country in protest when his professional association demanded he accept that if a man said he was a woman and asked to be referred to as ‘she,’ who was he to refer to him as ‘he?’Luckily for him, he was sufficiently well off that when he no longer cared to suffer fools who would compel him to say things he knew weren’t true, he could go elsewhere.But that was a few years ago. And I cherished the thought that, as a society, we might be retreating from the edge of vicious silliness. Hah! How unsmart was I!A few weeks ago, a Chilliwack school trustee was fined $750,000 by a human rights tribunal for calling the medical transition of minors from one sex to another “child abuse.” Silly chap saying that in BC; here in Alberta, we too have our doubts about sex changes for children (which is what medical transition means in plain English), and they aren’t legal for minors. But $750,000? Think somebody is saying never mind what you see, just be careful you don't say it?.Meanwhile, when the RCMP handling the Tumbler Ridge shooting came upon a dead man wearing a dress, who it was soon revealed had shot some other people, also found dead in the vicinity, they couldn’t quite find it in themselves to say ‘gunman.’ No, in a massive redundancy of caution lest other men in dresses be offended, they called him a ‘gunperson.’And so it goes on. Increasingly in Canada, public debate on contentious issues appears to be returning, and under a new rule: some claims must be accepted unquestioningly, even when the evidence is incomplete, uncertain, still emerging, or simply absent. We have entered the era of ‘compelled speech.’ Rather like the folk tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which people are afraid to say out loud what they can clearly see to be the truth — that their emperor has no clothes — they play along and deny the evidence of their lying eyes.To the credit of some bold Canadians, they, too, continue to state the truth out loud. But whereas in the fairy tale, a small boy blurts out the truth and everybody feels like a twit, it ends differently for those of today’s Canadians who dare to say what’s perfectly obvious. For that, they risk being labelled deniers or bigots and put through the process.Recent comments by Alberta Senator Scott Tannas illustrate the tension. Speaking before a Senate committee on indigenous peoples, Tannas asked a question that many Canadians privately wonder about but hesitate to voice publicly. In reference to claims of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential School sites, he asked how the country can address so-called “denialism” when the public believes there is still no “solid proof” in many cases..This question should not be controversial. It is a fundamental principle of justice and historical inquiry that serious claims deserve serious evidence. Asking for proof is not an act of hostility toward victims; it is the mechanism through which truth becomes credible and enduring.No reasonable person denies that some indigenous children had a hard time in a residential school. Families were separated, children died, cultures were suppressed, and generational trauma followed. These realities are well-documented and warrant national recognition and reflection.But acknowledging that does not require abandoning evidentiary standards, especially when grotesque allegations of even murder swirl around the subject. Yet, when reports first circulated in 2021 that ground-penetrating radar had identified 215 potential graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site, the news reverberated around the world. Flags were lowered, monuments were vandalized, churches were burned, and a national narrative quickly formed around the discovery.Yet ground-penetrating radar identifies soil disturbances, not confirmed human remains. Years later, no exhumations have verified those graves. Even the Senate committee itself acknowledged in a 2024 report that comprehensive data do not support the widely cited number of 4,100 children who died in residential schools.
