“Canada’s Newspaper of Record Asks: ‘What If They Ultimately Find Nothing?’”, asks Jonathan Kay at Quillette.
A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.
On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.
It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.
The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations can be associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.
The Globe and Mail is often referred to as Canada’s “Newspaper of Record”. True to Mr Kay’s predictions, it did carry a slightly repentant but very evasive retrospective. The Globe and Mail’s own link is here and the article can also be seen here. The article starts with the ringing title “There is no reconciliation without truth”, before immediately rowing back in the first line with “Two things can be true, at the same time.”
There is much else in the same vein, including this darvolicious line:
That there have been no human remains found at Kamloops does not mean children did not die there. It does not mean that crimes were not committed against children, crimes that were inexcusable. A contention otherwise is denialism, and it is morally repugnant.
As Jonathan Kay says,
In paragraph eight, the writers try a second motte-and-bailey gambit. We are informed that “regardless of what they find [in Kamloops], the fact remains that more than 3,500 children are named on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation‘s registry of students who died as a result of the residential school system, which operated in Canada for more than 160 years.” This is absolutely true. But it’s also completely irrelevant. No one disputes the information published by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which, unlike the Kamloops hysteria, was based on careful research. In that case, researchers had names, dates of birth, and other identifying details for the victims. None of that exists in the case of the Kamloops story.
The Globe’s implicit argument here is that it doesn’t really matter all that much if those 215 children actually existed or not, since we have the names of 3,500 other children that can be trotted out for the same purpose—so, at worse, we’re still batting 94% on dead-child statistics.
As my deliberately crude wording here is intended to suggest, the rhetorical trick the Globe is playing here isn’t just misleading, it’s also grotesquely reductionist. The documented deaths at residential schools were largely the result of tuberculosis. While the elevated tuberculosis death rates at residential schools represent a stain on Canada’s national conscience, the issue of substandard public-health amenities is completely distinct from lurid fairy tales in which mass murdering Catholic clerics intentionally dispatch 215 children into shallow graves. Every morally aware adult knows this, notwithstanding the Globe’s effort to blur the two categories.
“As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves.”
They obviously haven’t watched enough Time Team.
Stony,
I can’t watch that. Baldrick dicks around for an hour or so and the “geofizz team” find a cracked pot. Which is odd because in Tony Robinson they already have a crackpot.
In general,
If there ain’t no body, it ain’t a grave. I had a mate at school who was an air cadet. Anyway, they were on a field exercise in the wilds of Northumberland and he coped digging the latrine. He actually found bones! The cops were summoned, a medical examiner was summoned (and read on for why they should have also called Mulder and Scully).
Turns out someone had buried the remains of five greyhounds with no heads or paws. As far as I am aware no further action was taken but my mate was heavily and unfairly criticised by his platoon along the lines of, “You had an entire moor to dig and…”
Now that is a bizarre and macabre story.
Is it possible if they actually start digging they might find Hunter Biden’s other laptop?
That there have been no human remains found at the Globe and Mail head office does not mean children did not die there. It does not mean that crimes were not committed against children, crimes that were inexcusable.
Riffing on FrankH, “while there has been no proof offered yet that everything the Globe and Mail publishes is a lie, does not mean they aren’t lying now as well as yesterday and tomorrow.”
“as a result of the residential school system” – what is the evidence that disease was more common in the residential schools than it was in tribal villages? Child mortality was high in the tribal groups and always had been – was child mortality higher or lower in the residential schools?
It should also be remembered that the residential school system was an early example of “anti racist” doctrine – it was believed that ancestry was not relevant, that all that mattered was environment – and, so, if children were taken from the tribal villages and brought up in residential schools they would turn into modern Canadians. Was it a good idea – NO it was NOT a good idea, but the motivation was not “racist” (as the media and the modern education system now claim) – it was explicitly ANTI racist, a policy supported by the most “enlightened” people of the time.
As for “unmarked graves” – wooden grave markers were the custom for people both in and NOT in residential schools, wooden grave markers that rot away over a few years.
Again – the residential schools were a bad idea, a wretchedly bad idea, but they were considered “enlightened” – just as the people who now condemn them consider themselves enlightened.
And the modern campaign is a good example of how an entire establishment, government – media – education system – all the institutions, can just MAKE UP a story “murdered children and put them in unmarked graves” and make this lie orthodoxy – viciously persecuting anyone who tells the truth.
In the United States the word “racist” was coined, in the 19th century, to describe people who were AGAINST their version of the Residential School system.
Some of these critics did indeed regard the tribal peoples as inherently inferior (and so held the schools were pointless) – but some of the opponents just thought that taking children away from their parents was wrong (unless the parents were actively abusing the children) – although boarding schools were not uncommon at the time.
All the opponents got tarred with the same brush.
President Garfield wanted to set up a national system of government schools for black children – he thought that such a system would help them integrate into modern society and overcome the legacy of slavery. A horribly misguided idea – although his intentions were good.
Garfield was an interesting man – a cleric who never lost his religious view of public life. On the positive side he was a free trader (not normal for Republicans of the time – who were mostly Protectionists) although he did not fully explain how the Federal Government would be funded without tariff revenue, but on the negative side he supported the creation of a professional class of administrators – a Civil Service.
After his murder the American Civil Service was created – partly as a memorial to President Garfield.
DJM
Hmmm… this is a really interesting point. It was not public funds – this was SNP money from SNP supporters, not the general taxpayer. It was willingly given, not extracted by force of law.
That said, if your CEO is going to do this to your own hard raised funds _and the rest of the leadership then punishes anyone who asks awkward questions about what is going on, both internally (other SNP leaders) and externally (the press)_ then the rest of us can – must – ask legitimate questions about whether any of this shower are fit to govern.
Too late. The narrative is in place, and no amount of facts will displace it.
One of the story arcs in the TV series ‘1923’ concerns a native American girl who runs away from a Catholic-run Indian residential school in the US after killing the two nuns who had abused her. At one point, she muses about fleeing to Canada, at which point her native American interlocutor advises her ‘Don’t do that, it’s even worse there’. The idea of all residential schools, but especially those in Canada, as hell-holes of depravity, abuse and murder, is now the accepted history of that era. ITIARIS that a Canadian legislator proposed a law making it a crime to ‘deny’ this version of history – I don’t know whether it passed.
llater,
llamas
llamas – yes “a lie is halfway round the world, before the truth has got its boots on”.
From the Jews committing “genocide” (Sir “Ed” Davey leader of the Liberal Democrats), to “Social Reform” (more government spending and regulations) being a “Good Thing” (TM) most of what people are taught about public life is false.
As for 1923 – people are taught that President Harding (who had just died) was corrupt (he was not – and corruption in his Administration was LESS than in the Administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – but that corruption is not mentioned by the history books), and ineffective – when he was arguably the most effective President of the 20th century, releasing political prisoners, restoring Freedom of Speech, and dramatically reducing government spending.
The Pedant General – you comment has gone into the wrong thread.
And, as has already been pointed out, the SNP also gets taxpayer funding – and the money tends to mixed up (although, legally, it should not be).
Way higher in residential schools than in tribal villages, as documented in 1907 by chief medical officer of the federal Departments of the Interior and Indian Affairs, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce.