Canada’s “Story of the Year 2021” turns five on life support

“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.