Media Malpractice and Mass Panic.

Part II of The Poisoned Chalice of Reconciliation

Unreported inside baseball about the Globe and Mail’s Mea Culpa. Headline shocks about a Supreme Court decision last week that the Supreme Court didn’t decide. Reports about Canada’s “genocide” from an international tribunal that isn’t an international tribunal. Bonus: Some long-confidential background to Year of the Graves that has become immediately relevant.

Not exactly in that order.

Part I is here. It’s intended as the first instalment in a brief series providing the backstory to my special report in the National Post here to mark the fifth anniversary of the national psychotic episode incited by Justin Trudeau when he lowered the flags on Parliament Hill, and then on all federal buildings across the country and on Canada’s diplomatic missions around the world, on the last weekend in May, 2021.

In my brief Victoria Day edition of the Real Story I explained my absence by referring to the project I was busy with as quite possibly a career suicide note. It was a joke, or rather I was being melodramatically hyperbolic, and as it happens National Post managing editor Rob Roberts (the editor so nice they named him twice) is quite pleased with the result.

As things turned out, I didn’t dwell as long as I intended on Postmedia’s own susceptibility to hysterics and manic alarm over recent developments in what we used to call Indian country. I’ll get into some more of that in Part III, but the thing is, there’s been just too much error and pseudojournalism and imbecility to catalogue from the files of the CBC, CTV, the Toronto Star, the New York Times and so on.

What began with the Great Mass Graves Shock of 2021 hasn’t subsided, and I admit I’m determined to encourage a “long overdue reckoning” with all that.

There’s a lot of personal and professional risk involved in this sort of thing, which is the risk I took on the first anniversary, with Year of the Graves. It is never pleasant when one comes to the attention of the authorities for simply doing one’s job as a journalist. Long story short: I was roundly condemned as a genocide denier and a defender of child rapists. Worse: the RCMP cited Year of the Graves in a scan of threats to national security.

I did want to avoid a lengthy preamble and I wouldn’t want to impose a load of links to interrupt the flow today. There’s way more background to all this on the far side of this newsletter’s occasional paywalls, but this will give you an idea. It’s from my latest, in the Post. Skip ahead if you’ve already read it:

Canada Day celebrations were cancelled in several cities and towns or replaced by street demonstrations proclaiming Canada’s disgrace as an illegitimate, genocidal colonial settler state. Statues of John A. Macdonald, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Hugonard, James Cook and other historical figures were toppled by mobs or formally removed by local officials in Charlottetown, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton and Victoria.

Dozens of churches were desecrated and vandalized, and several were burned to the ground. Before the year was over the RCMP reported a 260 per cent spike in anti-Catholic hate crimes and Statistics Canada noted “the highest number of hate crimes targeting a religion since comparable data have been recorded.” Trudeau called the frenzies “unacceptable” but understandable: “The anger is real.”

If the anger was real, it was incited by the Trudeau government and by headlines like these.

New York Times, May 28, 2021: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Washington Post, June 24, 2021: “Hundreds of Graves Found at Former Residential School for Indigenous Children in Canada.” CBC, June 30, 2021. “182 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Residential School in B.C.’s Interior, First Nation Says.” The Guardian, UK, July 13: “A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school.”

None of these stories were true. In the case of the Kamloops horror story, more than 50 officers had been assigned to the Native Indian Residential Schools Task Force, which carried out an eight-year investigation that concluded in 2003. “Each of these allegations were thoroughly investigated by both the Task Force and the applicable Sub-Division Major Crime Unit. Not one of these allegations has ever been substantiated, much less proven.”

No “mass grave” was discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school five years ago. Even the Tkemlúps te Secwepemc Nation at Kamloops refuted that characterization within a week of the initial round of shocking headlines. Ever since, the Tkemlúps have gone back and forth on the subject, aided by $12.1 million in federal funds, from “probable burials” to graves to “signatures that resemble burials.”

The hundreds of graves “found” at Marieval in Saskatchewan, where Trudeau famously posed kneeling at a gravesite holding a teddy bear, were ordinary burials in a Cowesses community cemetery where gravestones had been removed. Cowessess elder and former Marieval student Lloyd Lerat said this about the graves: “We’ve always known these were there.… It’s just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that’s how it happens.”

The 182 graves “discovered” near the old St. Eugene’s residential school in B.C. at the Ktunaxa community of ʔAq’am were burials in a former pioneer cemetery later associated with a hospital and a Catholic mission that had lost its wooden crosses to grass fires over the years. “There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard,” Sophie Pierre, a former St. Eugene’s student who served for 25 years as the Ktunaxa tribal chair, explained later. “The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”

The 160 “unmarked graves” reported on Penelakut Island were not newly discovered. Some were associated with a cemetery, others were inferred from ground penetrating radar research, and more were the result of archeological surveys on the island’s foreshore. Twenty years earlier the RCMP had excavated a rumoured residential-school burial site on the island and came up with nothing.

Before the summer of 2021 was over, the remains of roughly 1,300 Indigenous children were reported to have been discovered on the grounds of long-shuttered residential schools across Canada. The stories were not true, and the horror stories did not end when the flags were raised again after Remembrance Day in 2021.

By then, the Trudeau government had set aside a $321-million fund to continue the search for graves, and so the search goes on, and the stories about clandestine burials of Indigenous children have become embedded in the way the federal government and several provincial governments expect Canadians to understand their history.

And that’s just what happened between the last weekend in May, 2021 and when the flags went up again after Remembrance Day. I didn’t touch on all the weird eruptions from the residential schools horror-story genre that have become routine occurrences in news stories ever since. I didn’t even get into how the pope was summoned from Rome to conduct a kind of national exorcism tour.

I didn’t get into how for a while there you could barely pick up a newspaper or tune into CBC without encountering demands that Canada and the Vatican renounce the doctrine of terra nullius - the notion that no one owned Canada prior to European assertions of sovereignty - even though the Supreme Court had already gone to lengths to explain that the doctrine “never applied in Canada, as confirmed by the Royal Proclamation (1763).” And it had been renounced by the Vatican five centuries ago.

That’s how weird it was. Here we were in the 21st century and journalists were suddenly fixated on whether or not the papal bull Sublimis Deus of 1537 sufficiently repudiated the papal Inter Coetera of 1493 and whether or not Pope Paul III had fixed things properly and how much blame should be laid at the feet the 15th-Century Pope Alexander VI for the poverty and dysfunctions afflicting the roughly 600 First Nations and Indian Act bands across Canada.

It was mental.

Most significantly, the construction of Canadian history that was jerryrigged by the Trudeau government and became the “official” story during the Year of the Graves, along with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 grab-bag “calls to action”, along with the mostly redundant but otherwise contradictory United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, have now become embedded in the way Ottawa and British Columbia understand the Crown’s obligations to First Nations under Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act.

UNDRIP and the TRC’s conception of Canada’s residential-schools legacy have also been insinuated into the way Ottawa understands its fiduciary duties arising from the Supreme Court of Canada’s perfectly straightforward instructions on the Crown’s duty to consult with Indigenous people to ensure their rights are not unjustifiably infringed.

This the claim I make in the National Post version of The Poisoned Chalice of Reconciliation:

Public debates about land claims, Canada’s history and the various roles Indigenous people played in that history have become minefields of speech-policing, extremist rhetoric and alarmist nonsense about aboriginal title sweeping away private property rights from coast to coast. Whatever you make of it, this is not what “reconciliation” looks like.

It’s an unholy mess. Here’s a video of a conversation between me and Rob Breakenridge about it all. Come back to it if you like, once you’re done here.

Here’s something that never even happened, just last week

CBC: Canada continuing genocide against Indigenous Peoples, international tribunal finds. Nevermind that the story is so riddled with error and hyperbole that it would take another 2,000-word newsletter to catalogue it all. The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal is not a legal tribunal in any sense of the term. It’s an Italian NGO founded in the 1970s and centred around a single individual, Gianni Tognoni.

Tognoni, who turned his career in public health and drug policy to a focus on human rights, has run the PPT since 1979. Fair play to him, but his “tribunal” is no more than a personal NGO. I’ve spent most of my working life in covering the field of international human rights and foreign policy and in all honesty I’d never even heard of these people before.

Here’s another thing that never even happened last week

Global News: Aboriginal title can’t be declared over private land, Supreme Court of Canada rules. Toronto Sun: LILLEY: Supreme Court backs private property rights against aboriginal claim – for now. CityNews: Aboriginal title can’t apply to private land, High Court rules. CHEK News: Aboriginal title can’t apply to private land, Supreme Court of Canada decides.

The Supreme Court said nothing about whether or not Aboriginal title can be declared over private land last week. There was no such ruling. The Supreme Court did not back or fail to back private property rights. These errors appear to have derived almost entirely from a single Canadian Press story about the SCOC’s decision not to grant a leave-to-appeal application in the Wolastoqey case in New Brunswick.

Dwight Newman explains this well enough, here.

Which brings us to even more apocalytic nonsense

Unlike the B.C. Court decision in the Cowichan case that we’re all invited to set our hair on fire about, the New Brunswick courts ruled Aboriginal title cannot give rise to a declaration of Aboriginal title underlying privately owned lands. But the New Brunswick courts did not find that the 18th century peace and friendship treaties extinguished aboriginal title.

In the Cowichan case, the B.C. judge did issue a declaration to the effect that Aboriginal title to an old fishing village on the Fraser River was never justifiably ceded or extinguished. There are about 100 privately-owned properties involved. The B.C. court found that in the case of privately-owned land, Aboriginal title and fee simple title can be made to co-exist, and any conflicts between the two are to be sorted out between the Crown and the First Nation involved.

In a nutshell, that’s what all the screaming about the “end of Canada” is about in the Cowichan case. The Court ordered British Columbia and Cowichan Tribes to negotiate the reconciliation of the conflict between Aboriginal title and private property rights. And in any case the Cowichan decision is not yet settled law. It’s being appealed and cross-appealed and it’s headed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Most of the legacy media’s trousers-wetting about the Cowichan case occurs in Postmedia newspapers, and some of it is hilarious, and it’s been adopted as doctrine by Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives (or maybe it’s the other way around). I really need to do a proper reconstruction of media malfeasance around the Cowichan decision, but the main thing I had to say about all that was this:

After British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 and well into the late 20^th century, successive provincial governments variously insisted that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 did not apply West of the Rockies, that treaty negotiations were unnecessary, that there was no such thing as aboriginal title on Canada’s west coast and that if there ever was, it was “extinguished” by provincial laws that came into effect after 1871.

This was an untenable posture, as a succession of Supreme Court rulings have made plain going back to the Calder case in 1973. It was untenable In the early 20^th Century, too, when tribal delegations in 1906 and 1926 travelled to London to press their case. Until 1949, the Judicial Council of the Privy Council in London was Canada’s highest court.

Which is why it was made illegal for First Nations to hire lawyers to advance their land grievances between 1927 and 1951.

In an apparent effort to make a contribution to the paranoid atmosphere set in motion by last August’s Court of Appeals ruling that aboriginal title remains a burden on the Crown title underlying private fee-simple interests in the vicinity of an old Cowichan fishing site on the Fraser River, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has lately taken up the argument that Prime Minister Mark Carney should be arguing the long-dead case for aboriginal title’s “extinguishment.”

There’s a lot more to be said about all this. I’d have thought we’d had enough panic inducement over Indigenous issues in this country. It doesn’t make me happy to see it in Postmedia newspapers.

In defence of the Globe and Mail

Well, in defence of Patrick Brethour and the Globe editorial board, anyway. This was heartening to see over the weekend:

There is no reconciliation without truth

The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools. That is an extraordinary assertion, one that requires proof.

That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tkemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.

The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. . .

Better late than never. Seriously. But what longtime paying subscribers to the Real Story will know is that four years ago, shortly after my Year of the Graves investigation appeared, Globe and Mail deputy national editor James Keller dispatched an alert to all staff about a Globe styleguide addition on how to report residential-school graves stories. Here’s some snips from it.

When covering these stories, we should be precise when describing these announcements, be specific about exactly what was found and how (for example, through the use of ground-penetrating radar), and attribute to the Indigenous community releasing the information.

. . . We should also include context about previous findings from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the deaths of students at residential schools and, when relevant, describe ground-penetrating radar and the limitations of the technology. While opinion writers have more latitude than they would in news copy, opinion pieces must ensure the basic details of these discoveries are presented accurately and in context.

. . . Never refer to mass graves. None of the discoveries from First Nations communities have involved mass graves and, while some of the early coverage described the findings this way, the term is and has always been inaccurate. Instead, refer to unmarked graves or unmarked burial sites.

. . . In June, 2021, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced it had located 751 potential unmarked graves in a defunct cemetery near the former Marieval Indian Residential School using ground-penetrating radar. The cemetery was used to bury Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of all ages. As of September, 2021, the community had identified 300 of the graves using documentary evidence. . .

So, not bad, relatively speaking.

But here’s where it gets positively scandalous

Another thing paying subscribers to the Real Story may recall: Macleans magazine knew, from the very day the Kamloops shock-horror headlines started making their way around the world, that there was something deeply, fatally wrong with it. Maclean’s editors knew. I knew. I know this because I was a Maclean’s contributing editor at the time.

My view was that we should get ahead of the story quickly, before everything got out of control. I was assigned the story. I filed what you could call an early version of my Year of the Graves investigation to Macleans on Tuesday, September 14, 2021. It was 3,179 words.

And there it sat. Is it running? Not running? What’s up? I wrote about it all here, in Some overdue news about the news. Newcomers to the Real Story might want to look it up.

I was later advised that the editors were quite pleased with it and it could serve as a year-in-review sort of thing, or a look-ahead to 2022 sort of thing, but in any case, hey, great story. And then finally, on November 9, I was told straight out, it’s not running, “it’s not you, it’s us.”

Enough for today.

I’ll be back with Part III soon enough, with some really creepy stuff about where the residential-schools horror genre came from, and why it persists. I’ll also have some things to say about the current crop of alarmist nonsense making the rounds.

There was no paywall today. There will be for Part III. If you support this kind of journalism, you know what to do.