Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Blacklock’s Reporter provides news coverage of bills, regulations, reports, committees, Federal Court, and public accounts.So, where does the name “Blacklock” come from?Remembered for his newsroom credo — “That ain’t the way I heard it!” — Thomas Hyland Blacklock was a pioneer publisher and war correspondent. Born in Halton County, Ontario, in 1870, he became a frontier editor and first mayor of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1903. Assigned to Parliament Hill by the Winnipeg Telegram in 1912, Tom remained a gallery man for life with columns published from Victoria to Halifax. As a WWI correspondent for the Montreal Gazette, he was a passionate advocate of the troops and became a confidante of Prime Minister Robert Borden. “I always held him in the warmest affection,” Borden recalled. In peacetime, Tom served as the 1922 president of the Ottawa Press Gallery and co-founded the Canadiana news service. At his death in 1934, the entire Ottawa press corps mourned Tom as “a keen observer blessed with a sense of proportion.”.Tom Blacklock’s legacy is displayed every day in the news site that bears his name, as the following story clearly reveals, in the process helping to debunk further an October 18, 2021, statement from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:“That’s the realization that Canadians have taken on following the leadership right here in Tk’emlups [Kamloops], a discovery in May of 215 indigenous kids in the graves just up the hill [and beside the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School],” said Trudeau. Canadians “have seen with horror those unmarked graves across the country and realize that what happened decades ago isn’t part of our history, it is an irrefutable part of our present,” he opined.Over five years later, what was initially called “the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” in an official Band media release no longer publicly available, are termed soil “anomalies” of unknown contents..Small wonder that on January 13, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty’s department was taken to task for breaching an Act of Parliament in concealing records about these so-called graves beside the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The department was ordered to begin releasing these files within 36 days.“The department must respond to the request without further delay,” wrote Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard. To date, the department has sealed all documents as “confidential information.”The “discovery” of these “unmarked graves” and the countrywide outrage it set off was chosen as Canada’s most compelling and deeply revealing news story of the year by 38 editors in newsrooms across the country..WIECHNIK: The absurdity of civilian resistance in a disarmed Canada.That compared with 31 votes for Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout and 13 for climate change and BC weather that saw massive fires in the summer and floods in the fall.Today, facts about this story are called “confidential information” by the Ministry of Crown-Indigenous Relations. What is not “confidential information” is that no attempt has ever been made to recover any skeletal remains from the site in question. However, the Band received $12.1 million in funding for “exhumation of remains” and forensic DNA testing..As a condition of funding, the Band was required to submit regular Activity Progress Reports. Minister Alty’s department attempted to seal all the reports sought by Blacklock’s Reporter on December 15 as confidential.A second Blacklock’s request for “all Activity Progress Reports regarding the Tk’emlups Indian Residential School Survivor Project or any related ‘missing children’ program” funded by Minister Alty’s department remains active. “In total, 576 pages of relevant records were received,” wrote the Information Commissioner..MACLEOD: Language over skills — why the 2026 immigration plan is a betrayal of the West.The department said it was overworked and “did not have sufficient capacity to start the analysis of this file,” even after a full year. The Commissioner rightly rejected that excuse.“I find the time taken by the department to advance the processing of this request unacceptable,” wrote the Commissioner. “Nothing in the Access to Information Act allows the department to delay processing requests due to limited staff or other competing priorities.”.OLDCORN: If the NDP is a ‘Big Tent,’ why are radicals being shown the exit?.“As such, any additional time that is taken to respond to this request is another day by which the complainant’s rights of access are being denied,” wrote the Commissioner. “This lack of responsiveness is in clear contravention of the department’s obligations under the Act and undermines the credibility of the access system.”No parliamentary committee to date has investigated the Kamloops graves story, instead accepting the Band’s May 27, 2021 announcement as gospel truth. Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau quickly ordered the lowering of the Peace Tower flag for over five months and visited the site to “pay my respects to the graves,” graves that most likely contain the buried remains of school drainage tiles.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
