James C. McCrae is the former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew recently announced a $20 million dollar grant to the University of Manitoba for the construction of a new National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba. In 2022, the federal government committed $60 million for the same project.The University's National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is considered a key component of reconciliation in Canada, partly because, among other functions, the NCTR staff maintain a Memorial Register of student deaths at Indian residential schools.However, questions have existed for years about the accuracy of the NCTR staff's Memorial Register since evidence from provincial death certificates establishes that the Register includes the names of hundreds of children whose deaths had nothing at all to do with their attendance at Indian residential schools..CURNISKI: No, AI will not teach my children.Concerns about the accuracy of the Memorial Register are exemplified by the inclusion in the Register, until very recently, of the name of Helen Betty Osborne.Fifty-four years ago, 19-year-old Helen Betty Osborne — “Betty” to her friends and family — was brutally murdered near The Pas, Manitoba. If you are old enough to remember events subsequent to the horrible crime that took her young life, you will know that a police investigation resulted, many years later, in the murder conviction of only one of the four young white men alleged to be involved in her brutal death.Betty’s case was thoroughly examined by Manitoba’s Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, headed by the late Judge Murray Sinclair and the late Justice Alvin Hamilton. The inquiry report was issued in 1991..Details which establish that Betty’s death had nothing to do with an Indian residential school have thus been publicly known for many years. The NCTR staff, however, wanted Canadians to believe she “died at or went missing from” the Guy Hill Indian Residential School near The Pas, and her name was listed for years on the NCTR’s Memorial page for that school. In fact, Helen Betty Osborne had attended the Guy Hill Indian Residential School as a young student. However, after being discharged from Guy Hill, she enrolled at the Margaret Barbour Collegiate, a public high school in The Pas, where, according to Wikipedia, she boarded at the home of a non-indigenous family. That was her situation at the time of her death. She did not “die at or go missing from” the Guy Hill school or any other residential school. The Guy Hill Indian Residential School had absolutely nothing to do with her death. Why, then, did the NCTR staff insist on having Canadians believe otherwise? The NCTR staff were aware of their error at least as early as March 2022 when the erroneous inclusion of Betty’s name on the Memorial Register was brought to their attention..OLDCORN: Time to end the Alberta teachers’ strike now.What was the NCTR staff's response? In an email dated March 10, 2022, the Centre’s senior archivist, Jesse Boiteau, wrote: “Many names are added at the request of family members of children they lost who attended residential school. It may be the wish of these families to memorialize their lost children among the names of their schoolmates.” Later in the same email: “As we are continuing our efforts on residential school research and helping Survivors and their families to heal, we will not be replying to further questions on the registry.”.So much for accountability. And so much for openness and truth. Although Helen Betty Osborne's name was finally removed very recently in a major revision of the Register, it was erroneously included for more than three years after the University's NCTR staff had been informed of the error, along with the names of hundreds of other children whose deaths did not occur at Indian residential schools. Provincial death certificates prove that many died in hospitals, and at home on their reserves as a result of drownings, house fires, auto accidents, and from other causes having nothing whatever to do with residential schools, and that most are buried on their home reserves.Canadians might well ask how these egregious errors on the NCTR Memorial Register occurred. How and why did the TRC get the 'residential school deaths' and 'missing children' issues so wrong in the first place?.SLOBODIAN: BC’s barbaric secret — Teen girls mutilated in ‘gender affirming clinics’ while NDP politicians cheer.The answer appears to be a simple one. When the TRC initiated its Missing Children Project in 2008, it adopted a criterion which, on its face, was clearly unworkable - one might even say absurd. As explained in the TRC's Missing Children and Unmarked Burials report, the TRC considered every death an Indian residential school death if the child died during the school term or within a year of having been discharged from the school.That unworkable criterion for inclusion of a child's name in the NCTR Memorial Register resulted in Indian residential schools being spuriously blamed for hundreds of deaths which had nothing to do with the schools. A few examples from provincial death certificates (there are hundreds more):Bruce Jumbo (died in a house fire on his reserve)David Allen Hance (died of acute alcohol poisoning while at home for Christmas)Edward Thomson (drowned while at home during summer holidays)Isaiah Powderface (died of a gunshot wound while at home for Christmas)Stephanie Joe (died on her reserve in a house fire, along with her two brothers)Madeleine Giroux (died of a fractured skull after being “struck in head by a tent pole which was hit by a falling tree”)Merle Paul (died in hospital after being burned in a barn fire at home)Shirley Link (died in a fire at the family home)Bobby Joseph Bell (died after being struck by a falling tree at home during summer holidays)Herbert Robert Green (drowned at home during summer holidays)Harry and Edward James (died in a house fire while at home for Christmas).Clearly, deaths such as the foregoing examples which occurred while a child was enrolled at a residential school, but which occurred off the school premises and were the result of hospitalizations and fatal accidents which had nothing to do with the school, should not be misrepresented to the Canadian public as 'residential school deaths' or 'missing children'. Similarly, deaths which occurred after a child had been discharged from a residential school - as was the case with Helen Betty Osborne - should not be misrepresented to the Canadian public as residential school deaths.The carelessness with which the NCTR's Memorial Register was originally compiled by the TRC and added to by the NCTR staff is also exemplified by the fact that adults were erroneously included in the Register as 'residential school deaths' and 'missing children', among them:Gabriel Crane, a widower, age 34, who died of tuberculosisMarie Victorine Lepine (24 or 25 years old, a “pupil’s keeper” at a residential school who died of tuberculosisWillard Frank William, who, far from dying as a child at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, lived to the age of 85, dying in 2019..PARKE: Public education and the myth of separation of church and state.The University of Manitoba employs the NCTR staff, including its Executive Director, Stephanie Scott, and Head Archivist, Raymond Frogner, and it is thus the University which is ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the Memorial Register.The University's President, Dr. Michael Benarroch, has been informed of the misinformation on the Memorial Register and has been asked to ensure that the Register is corrected. So have the Premier of Manitoba, Wab Kinew, and every member of the Manitoba Legislature. Neither the President of the University nor the Premier has responded to this request..The question is why? Why is it necessary to mislead indigenous Canadians about the causes of the deaths of so many of their children and to cause them so much pain? Do the President of the University and Premier Kinew not care how much it hurts everyone— indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians alike— when a taxpayer-funded institution is so careless with the truth? The verifiable harm caused by the schools certainly justifies reasonable steps toward healing, but the longer the whole truth is kept from the Canadian public, the more any hope for reconciliation diminishes. Deliberately telling people awful things that are not true produces anger and mistrust. When our institutions, governments, and the media come clean and tell Canadians the truth, the road will be cleared for a better future for all of us. James C. McCrae is the former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.
