Will the damage ever be undone?
Canada is still crippled by the state-incited bedlam of 2021. We're recovering, but we're still pretending it never happened.
On the anniversary of a national psychotic episode. . .
Four years ago this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the flags lowered on all federal buildings across Canada. He’d already ordered the flags lowered on Parliament Hill over the weekend before. All the flags remained at half mast for six long months.
There were riots. Statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Hugonard, James Cook and other historical figures were toppled by mobs or formally removed in Charlottetown, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton, Lebret and Victoria.
At least 70 Catholic churches were burned or vandalized or otherwise desecrated; churches of other denominations were also randomly attacked. When the year 2021 came to an end the RCMP reported a 260 percent spike in anti-Catholic hate crimes in Canada. Canada’s since-defenstrated prime minister Justin Trudeau said the mayhem was “unacceptable” but understandable: “The anger is real.”
Canada Day celebrations were cancelled entirely in cities and towns across the country, in Fredericton, Victoria, St. Catharines and Dawson City. Elsewhere, with Ottawa’s official blessing and often with federal funding, Canada Day events were replaced by demonstrations of shame and repentance for Canada’s heritage as an illegitimate and racist colonial settler state, riven with Islamophobia and twisted out of shape by structural racism.
The mania of 2021 was set in motion by the reported discovery of a “mass grave” at an old Indian residential school in Kamloops that sent shockwaves around the world. Except no mass grave was discovered there, and no evidence for any burials at the site has yet emerged.
To follow any of Canada’s major news organizations in the weeks and months after the Kamloops report was to be led to believe a cascade of shocking reports about discoveries of grave sites containing the remains of murdered and missing residential schoolchildren at one old residential school site after another. Before the year was over, roughly 1,300 such burials were reported to have been discovered. Except there were no such discoveries.
Chinese and Russian propaganda networks were thick and heavy with it all.
It wasn’t a “hoax.” It was much worse than that.
At Kamloops, 215 dead children, “some as young as three years old,” were said to have been buried by their classmates in secret moonlight rituals overseen by nuns in an old apple orchard. An independent report subsequently made available to the T’kemlups tribal authorities shows that the soil disturbances picked up by ground penetrating radar were in all likelihood septic tiles from the 1920s. The report has attracted almost no notice.
At Marieval in Saskatchewan and at St. Eugene’s in British Columbia, the purported discoveries were in fact burials in old cemeteries with little or no evidence that the enumerated interments contained the remains of residential schoolchildren. At Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia, a costly and extensive investigation revealed only two graves, and they turned out to contain the remains of a pair of Irish immigrants from decades before the residential school was built there.
On it goes like this. Here we are, four years on, and not a single archeological dig or police investigation from the tumults of 2021 has produced evidence of any secretly buried schoolchildren. Not a single child has been exhumed. Not at Kamloops, not at Penelakut, not at the Camsell Grounds in Edmonton nor at Pine Creek in Manitoba. But here’s where the bizarre turns to the sinister.
A diagnosis of demon-possession
To merely report these astonishing facts is to be accused of committing a hate crime and to be denounced as a genocide denier. It is also to “come to the attention of the authorities.” This was my predicament after I was assigned to make sense of it all for the National Post, on the first anniversary of the initial reports from Kamloops. It remains my lot.
After my Year of The Graves investigation was published I found myself accused of being a racist who supports and defends child rapists. This sort of abuse I can handle. But I’ve also been accused of violating a proposed amendment to Section 219 of Canada’s Criminal Code.
Section 219 covers the crime of wilful promotion of hatred. It’s the section that contains the legal prohibition of Holocaust Denial. Bill C-413, which passed first reading in the House of Commons on September 26 last year, creates the new Section 219 offence, “residential schools denialism,” which would carry a penality of up to two years imprisonment.
The Year of the Graves investigation wasn’t even about Canada’s residential schools, it’s important to point out. It contained no heterodox arguments or claims about the legacy of the schools or the harms they caused. Elsewhere, right or wrong (and I accept the criticism that I may be wrong about this) I have generally agreed with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 finding that the schools constituted “cultural genocide.”
Even so, I am declared guilty of the proposed Section 219 offence by the co-inventor of the “residential schools denialism” doctrine, University of Manitoba settler-colonial studies expert Sean Carleton. Carleton has called Year of the Graves a “textbook” case of the crime. I stand similarly accused by Marc Miller, the recently re-elected former minister for Indigenous services who presided as Crown-Indigenous relations minister during the 2021 upheavals.
My guilty verdict in the matter of Year of the Graves has also been declared by Jesse Wente, the chairman of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, and by committees of the Canadian Archeological Association, the Society for American Archeology the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA-ACAB), and the Canadian Permafrost Association (CPA).
Last year, my accusers’ false claims about Year of the Graves were cited by the RCMP in its periodic review of potential risks to Canada’s security. My Post colleague Chris Selley pointedly asks: Why are police stigmatizing factual reporting about residential school graves?
“Residential schools denialism” is a postmodernist, post-truth phenomenon that well illustrates how these recent ruptures in Enlightenment epistemology are functionally indistinguishable from the pre-modern. It’s just like the hounding of witches. To be condemned as a “denialist” is the contemporary Canadian equivalent of being found to be possessed by the devil.
As you might imagine, the name of chief inquisitor Sean Carleton is always at the ready in the digital rolodexes of the mainstream media’s avante garde in Canada, especially the CBC.
I’m happy to report that after all this time, Year of the Graves still stands up. Apart from the 6,266-word investigation into the explosion of antisemitism in Canada that I produced for Bari Weiss’ Free Press last December, Year of the Graves was the most important in-depth longform journalism endeavour I’ve undertaken in a while.
On that note, there’s an old adage about Jew-hatred that goes like this: First they come for the Saturday people, then they come for the Sunday people. In Canada, it happened the other way around.
It should come as no surprise that after the massacres of October 7, 2023, all the loudest voices from the residential-schools “activism” immediately merged with the loudest voices in the ‘From Turtle Island to Palestine’ histrionics.
A lot more on the other side of the paywall. If you want to support journalism of the kind that gets me into this kind of trouble, you know what to do.