Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.On October 27, 2022, Leah Gazan, an NDP member of Canada’s federal parliament and the half-indigenous daughter of a Holocaust survivor, succeeded in getting the following motion unanimously passed by the House of Commons without debate and without presenting any evidence to back it up:“That, in the opinion of the House, the government must recognize what happened in Canada's Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”.STIRLING: When pipelines and projects were based on evidence, not ideology.Gazan’s effort to stigmatize our country by labelling it with the most heinous of human crimes was no isolated act because other highly placed activists had long jumped aboard the Indian Residential School (IRS) bandwagon. For example, Kimberly Murray, special federal interlocutor on missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites, released an interim report on June 16, 2023, arguing “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism.Unsurprisingly, Murray’s “opening words” to the report stated, "My role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective – it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and Spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve,” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.”This attack on the fundamental precepts of the objective search for truth based on reason, logic, and scientific evidence – rooted in a paradigm clash between Western and indigenous knowledge systems – gave her leave to label “denialism” as an “attack” whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves..Moral certainty based on indigenous ways of knowing, rather than objective evidence from Western science, allowed Murray to state that Canada had a role in combating this denialism by giving “urgent consideration” to the legal tools available to address the problem, including civil and criminal sanctions.“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered on the Cowessess Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan on June 16.But there is no photographic evidence anywhere in Canada of IRS children buried beside their long-shuttered boarding schools..OLDCORN: Is Ottawa trying to censor the Bible? Liberals' assault on Christianity continues.The only photographic evidence available is of regular church burials and of thousands of happy school children. As for the records, they show that the few residential school children who died at the schools were buried in school cemeteries beside buried school staff or in reserve cemeteries belonging to other bands. Conversely, most succumbed to a contagious disease like tuberculosis over which indigenous people have little natural immunity. All received a proper Christian burial and were interred on their home reserves. Several contrarians have long argued that there are few truly missing students; only records of their school attendance and demise are lost or missing. On March 21, 2023, Kimberly Murray, perhaps inadvertently, confirmed this assertion in her testimony before the federal government Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples when she said:“The family doesn’t know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told … that they died. I can get the name of that individual, [of so-called missing children], I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to Ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on Ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won’t just provide those records?”.As for Gazan, on Friday, October 31, she argued that “skeptics” must not harm “the work of truth-telling. We owe survivors more than words. We owe them action.”This was her rationale for reintroducing a near-identical version of her 2024 piece of legislation, C-413, that lapsed with the end of the forty-fourth sitting of Parliament. Both bills stipulated jail time – up to two years in prison – for anyone publicly “justifying the Indian Residential School (IRS) system.”“It is a bill I dedicate to all Residential School survivors and our families,” said Gazan. “Survivors are carrying truths this country needed to hear, truth of violence, loss, and resilience. They share their stories not to reopen wounds but to help this country heal. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reminded us, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.”.AICHELE / WITTEVRONGEL: Parents want academics, Alberta teachers want activism.“Yet today, denialism is spreading, twisting facts, denying genocide, and reigniting harm,” said Gazan. “It is not only hurtful, it is dangerous.”There is no denying that many indigenous children had unpleasant, even traumatic, experiences in their boarding schools, a feature they share with many non-indigenous children sent to residential schools by their wealthy parents. But what is truly harmful, hurtful, and dangerous is failing to tell the truth about life in Canada’s IRSs, an assertion supported by the work of dozens of researchers who have carefully and objectively highlighted the many flaws and systemic biases in the six-volume final report of the TRC, as revealed here, here, here, here, and here.Bill C-254 An Act To Amend The Criminal Code would impose Gazan’s maximum jail term for anyone who “other than in private conversation wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous people by condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian Residential School system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.” Exceptions are permitted for people who “establish the statements communicated were true” or “relevant to any subject of public interest.”.“This bill is about protecting their safety, honouring their truth, and ensuring the hard-won truth of what happened in Residential Schools is never erased or denied again,” said Gazan. “I call on all Members of Parliament to stand with survivors to protect the truth, uphold dignity, and walk the path of real reconciliation together.”The 2015 TRC report never used the unqualified term genocide to describe the residential school experience. Instead, it employed the extra-legal and politically disparaging term “cultural genocide.” Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau, in a 2015 statement, told the CBC, “I accept the Commission’s report, including the fact they used the word [cultural] ‘genocide.’”In fact, "cultural genocide” could easily be used to describe the assimilation experience of millions of non-indigenous children whose home language was neither English nor French..BARBER: Trump brings home deals, Carney brings home nothing .Trudeau had at times also used the unqualified term "genocide" when speaking about this issue. When he accepted the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report, which concluded that the deaths and disappearances amounted to genocide, his office quickly qualified that accepting the conclusion was not the same as officially supporting the legal definition.Gazan has been preoccupied with the same inflammatory rhetoric, including the charge of genocide, for years, indifferent to the gradual shift by most of the parties involved – aboriginal leaders, government officials, media outlets, and ordinary citizens – as more evidence is slowly revealed.Yes, federal agencies characterized the system as genocidal after the 2021 announcement by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Indian Band of Kamloops, BC, that it had discovered the remains of 215 children using ground-penetrating radar in an abandoned apple orchard at a former Residential School. But no remains have ever been recovered despite $12.1 million in funding for exhumations, DNA testing, and coroners’ analysis..According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Parks Canada quietly deleted all reference to “genocide” on August 13, 2025, in its sixth historic site designation of an Indian Residential School. This is a relatively new deletion, says Blacklock’s Reporter, because the agency, as recently as February 12, claimed the schools fostered “cultural genocide.”No explanation was given for this change in terminology except that “Ground-penetrating radar often throws up false positives, anomalies that are not indicative of anything significant. Until there is further investigation of the sites at Kamloops… refer to them as ‘possible graves.’”Neither was any reason given for a closely related change in terminology by the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Indian Band itself. On May 27, 2021, the Band’s chief “confirm[ed] an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, 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.”.OLDCORN: Supreme Court’s softening on child porn sentences is a national disgrace.On May 18, 2024, the Band suddenly changed its designation of “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” to “the confirmation of 215 anomalies,” meaning soil disturbances of unknown content, yet continued to insist it had “confirmed an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.”Still, the government of Canada continues to promote the notion that what occurred at the Kamloops Indian Residential School “has been called genocide by Survivors, Pope Francis I, the House of Commons, and others,” ignoring the elementary fact that there is no credible evidence that even a single student was murdered by staff members at any of the country’s Indian Residential Schools, reason enough to dismiss any accusation of genocide.As for Gazan’s resurrected bill, like nearly all private member bills promoted by parliamentary opposition members, it has little chance of becoming law.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
