Mick Hartley

Jonathan Kay reported on this in Quillette last week:

The closest thing Canada has to The New York Times is The Globe & Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper that defines—to a rough order of approximation—what respectable Canadians of a certain age are supposed to say and think. As with most legacy media outlets, its influence has faded significantly over the years. But as recent events show, it hasn’t vanished completely.

As I reported in last week’s Deeply Problematic column, May 27 marked the five-year anniversary of the announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children had been located on the grounds of a former Catholic-run residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. As is now widely known, this claim was false: No actual graves have been located, let alone corpses or human remains. Alas, no one at the Globe—or any other outlet for that matter—bothered fact-checking the original claims back in the Spring of 2021, which is why the country summarily descended into a months-long spasm of morbid self-laceration. Justin Trudeau, who’d originally presented himself to voters as a proud Canadian patriot, would spend the rest of his tenure blood-libelling his own country as a genocide state….

It therefore ranked as an important development when, on May 22, the Globe published a lengthy news feature plainly conceding that not a single “unmarked grave” has been located in Kamloops; and that the Kamloops First Nation has been secretive and evasive when questioned about when it plans to get on with excavations. (Following years of increasingly dubious excuses for her inaction, the band leader recently said she may skip excavations completely, and instead declare the whole area to be a shovel-free “Sacred Site.”)

Now here’s Hadley Freeman in today’s Sunday Times:

Exactly five years ago last weekend, the man now known as Mr Katy Perry —  but then known as the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau —  ordered that the flags be lowered to half-mast on all Canadian federal buildings. This was out of respect for the indigenous children who had died in the country’s residential schools that were government-funded and run by Christian churches from the 19th century to the late 20th century. Thousands of unmarked graves for those children had just been discovered, it was reported, forcing the country into,  to use the lingo of the time,  a racial reckoning. Horrifying claims emerged: that priests had beheaded children; that nuns had forced children to bury babies;  that during a 1964 visit to Kamloops Residential School, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had invited children on a picnic who were never seen again. 

The apparent discovery of the mass graves made headlines around the world, including in The Sunday Times. Canadian luminaries including Naomi Klein spoke passionately about this terrible stain on Canada’s history. In July 2021, Trudeau was photographed clutching a teddy bear and kneeling by a small flag at a grave by a former residential school. He said that “as a Catholic” his heart was broken. But the grave he was kneeling at wasn’t a dumping ground for indigenous children killed by evil priests and nuns. It was a standard Catholic cemetery. Because in this story — and you might have guessed this already from the “Queen Elizabeth the kidnapper” element — the truth became increasingly obscured. 

It was, in fact, a moral panic – the kind to which the guilt-ridden “settler colonialists” of Canada seem particularly prone. And for years the whole Canadian establishment swallowed it whole. Our very own genocide!

May 2021 was an era more febrile than factual, and it’s no coincidence that the gothic stories about murdered indigenous children, followed by furious national protests, emerged just after the first anniversary of the killing of George Floyd. The Canadian politician Carolyn Bennett made the connection explicit: “This week has opened the eyes of many Canadians, just like George Floyd did.” Hey, so America is having race riots and national self-flagellations? Well, Canada can do that, too!

From the start, indigenous leaders were cautious about the claims children had been murdered at the schools: “We’ve always known [the graves] were there … It’s just the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there, because that’s how it happens,” one elder said. But of course the story didn’t “create itself” —  it was pushed by activists and politicians who saw an opportunity to bully and silence people while scoring virtue points.  The few journalists who did scrutinise the graves story, such as Terry Glavin, whose articles  about this saga are lucid and enraging, were vilified as genocide enablers. Anyone who dared to question  allegations of mass child murder was accused of “residential school denialism”, which several Canadian politicians sought to make a crime on a par with Holocaust denialism. 

One such politician is Leah Gazan, a New Democratic Party MP. Gazan was in the news for a different reason two months ago, when in a press conference she referred to “the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”, which is a yet further elaboration of the ever-expanding LGBT acronym [see here – MH]. When many pointed out that it sounds more like a wifi password than shorthand for oppressed people, Gazan dismissed them as “bigots”.  Because that’s the modern activist playbook right there: make a wildly extreme statement, bandy around terms like “genocide” and denounce anyone who doesn’t swallow it all unquestioningly as a fascist. Then move on to the next cause and destroy their credibility too. 

Canada’s indigenous people really did suffer horrific abuses at the schools. But thanks to the activists’ fetishistic and exploitative imaginings, the scandal has now gone down, Glavin wrote last week, “the same rabbit hole where you’ll find secret torture chambers beneath the Vatican [and] Jewish 9/11 plots”. Well, it combined voyeuristic ghoulishness with white guilt and scolding — it couldn’t have been more of a 2020s story if it had somehow involved Taylor Swift.

A comment:

The Kamloops Residential School where the ‘mass graves’ were first (falsely) revealed by ground penetrating radar was not a school where attendance was compulsory for aboriginal children. Parents chose to send them there.

What followed from this ‘discovery’ was quite remarkable. Flags lowered for months until people realized that at our Remembrance Day ceremonies on Nov. 11 could not honour veterans by that act. Tens of millions were spent to further investigate other schools. There were also many churches in British Columbia that were torched by arsonists. Churches that supported native communities. No charges were ever laid. Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth were vandalized with red paint and pulled down at provincial legislatures in full view of the police forces. No charges were ever laid in spite of video evidence of the perpetrators.

One of the greatest failures of our media and politicians.