Opinion
From mass graves to mass hysteria

The grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, where some believe Indigenous students may be buried — though there have not been any excavations. – Reuters
The Opposition with Dan Knight
A Canadian Teacher Fired for Challenging the Narrative on Residential Schools—Where’s the Evidence, Where’s the Justice?

I am a teacher buffeted daily by the chill winds of political indoctrination, censorship, conformity, and anti-education in schools.
|
The New York Post reported this month that “after two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains.” In July 2021 the Assembly of First Nations claimed the “mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School was proof of a “pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples that must be thoroughly examined.”
Yet the Canadian government already examined residential schools from 2008-15 through The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with Commission Chair Murray Sinclair telling the media the number of missing children “could be in the 15-25,000 range, and maybe even more.” To date there has not been a single missing child identified, and not a single document from a parent or chief indicating a child was missing from any of the almost 150 schools over almost 150 years.
I’m not ignorant of the subject of our past as I am informed on the subject of Indian Residential Schools as I am a member of the pan-Canadian Indian Residential Schools Research Group. I also did a Master’s degree in Educational History with specialization in Indian Educational Policy under the supervision of Dr. Robert Carney, who was once the leading expert on the schools. I also obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto where I argued A Case Against Censorship in Literature Education. Professionally, I have taught in high schools, elementary schools, and colleges and was for a time Principal of Neuchâtel Junior College in Switzerland. My last position was in Abbotsford as a senior French Immersion History teacher. It is to Abbotsford that I now turn, for that is where I was fired.
One fateful day in May 2021 I was teaching Calculus 12 at a high school named after the painter Robert Bateman where news was feverishly spread about the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School. The principal used the PA system to ask teachers to stop their regular instruction to navigate the upsetting news with students. In this context, I spoke about the history of residential schools, the dislocation and despair of prairie First Nations (most residential schools being located in the Canadian west), the Indian Act (1876) and its authors’ intentions to support its most marginalized communities, the role of the church as teachers and proselytizers, and the reports of abuse and neglect.
As it was a math class, some of the students were uninterested or bored by my history soliloquy, but one girl spoke up to say the schools represented “cultural genocide.” I agreed with her by saying that modern western schooling was mandatory for indigenous children after 1920, and a third of these children were placed in residential schools (another third attending day schools, and the final third receiving no education at all).
I considered the discussion to be like any other, with some students engaged and others on their phone or quietly doing equations, until a second student, flush with anger and indignancy, reacted to my comment that children who died tragically while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease. She said the Christian teachers in Kamloops (Oblate priests and brothers as well as nuns from the Catholic order The Sisters of St. Ann) were “murderers who tortured students to death by leaving them out in the snow to die.”
I didn’t say anything more, for I feared an argument, and directed students to return to their Calculus work. The class was given a break a few minutes later, and unbeknownst to me the girl complained to a counsellor, who told the principal, who told the district, and before class was over that day, I had a visit from two male administrators who commanded me in front of my students to gather my things and leave. While being frog-marched through the corridor I repeatedly asked what I had done wrong, but they wouldn’t answer. When I was close to the front door I turned to them and said I wouldn’t be leaving without hearing from the principal what I had done. This request was granted, but all the principal would say to me was that it was something I said.
My suspension ended after eight months when the district released its investigator’s report, to which senior management appended a charge of professional misconduct, as the following excerpts show:
“While acting as a TOC for a Calculus 12 class, Mr. McMurtry…inferring [sic] that many of the deaths were due to disease was in opinion inflammatory, inappropriate, insensitive, and contrary to the district’s message of condolences and reconciliation.”
“He left students with the impression some or all of the deaths could be contributed to ‘natural causes’ and that the deaths could not be called murder.”
“Both Mr. McMurtry and student accounts had some students passionately saying the deaths were murder, [and] the graves were mass graves.”
“[We] consider this to be extremely serious professional misconduct.”
While on suspension I dug into the grave story of murdered children and found I was right. Indeed, there was no discovery at all at the residential school in Kamloops in the middle of the Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc reserve. No graves. No bodies. No murder weapons. No police investigation. No historical record or documentation from a parent or tribal leader of a missing child. Nonetheless, prime minister Justin Trudeau unilaterally ordered that our country lower its flag from coast to coast and in our embassies around the world for over five months, though all that Culture/Media professor Sarah Beaulieu (the sole source of the story) found, using ground-penetrating radar in an abandoned apple orchard on the reserve, were soil anomalies, likely sewage trenches or tiles from 1924. My judgment day was February 21, 2023. The Abbotsford School District trustees had to pronounce on a recommendation for termination from management. That very day I saw that the National Post featured my story on Page 1. I was suddenly under a deluge of support from many media platforms, especially Rebel News which sent a reporter to cover the disciplinary hearing. I boldly predicted in front of supporters that my case was strong and the tide in Canada was turning against cancel culture and its witch hunts, but I was wrong. I was fired and will likely never teach again. Canadian historian Marcel Trudel wrote:
“There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense; or history used for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history.”
I would add that there is nothing more dangerous, in these times, than teaching history truthfully.
In my termination letter this February the case against me changed again, this time it was no longer about what I said but only my “inflammatory, inappropriate, and insensitive tone” that one day two years ago. Then this August I received a letter from the regulatory body for teachers, called the Teaching Regulation Branch (formerly the BC College of Teachers), which changed the case against me again. Now I am accused of “falsely suggesting that student deaths at the schools were comparable to the general child mortality rate and not the result of a government strategy of cultural genocide.” In the same letter the TRB calls for the cancellation of my teaching certificate for life… before my case has arrived at arbitration, before an arbitrator has been chosen or dates have even been set, and long before the merits of my case have been fairly determined.
In Kafka’s play The Trial there is a familiar quotation:
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.”
Subscribe to The Opposition with Dan Knight
I’m an independent Canadian journalist exposing corruption, delivering unfiltered truths and untold stories. Join me on Substack for fearless reporting that goes beyond headlines
Crime
First Good Battlefield News From Trump’s Global War on Fentanyl

From
for the Daily WireMaltz attributes slowing fentanyl smuggling directly to Trump’s controversial 25% trade tariffs, which compelled the first Mexican military raids against production labs in Sinaloa Cartel-controlled Culiacán, Mexico.
It’s early but not too early to note that President Donald Trump’s all-out World War on cross-border fentanyl smuggling into the United States, the highly lethal synthetic opiate responsible for 120,000 American overdose deaths in recent years, is achieving remarkable impacts for the first time in a decade.
A key indicator of broader total smuggling at and between the southern border’s ports of entry — U.S. law enforcement seizures of fentanyl — has dropped 50% since the November election, indicating a greater decline in total fentanyl smuggling.
That decline is attributable to Trump’s reset of U.S. Customs and Border Protection orders to aggressively hunt the drug as they and thousands of active-duty soldiers are now free of the distracting duty of processing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border every month throughout Joe Biden’s term. Trump policies quickly ended that mass migration distraction, as I wrote in The Daily Wire on March 20.

A 2024 seizure of fentanyl pills manufactured in Mexico. DEA photo.
For context on the change with inbound fentanyl flows, from 2019 to 2023, the amounts seized rose every year in tandem with American overdose deaths and remained high in the 2,000-pound monthly range during 2024.
But In December and January, President-elect Trump threatened devastating trade tariffs against Mexico if they did not seriously crack down on cartel production and smuggling even before he entered office.
From October 2024 to January 2025, Southwest Border seizures of fentanyl fell from 2,000 pounds in 85 seizure events, to 990 pounds in 47 seizure events, CBP seizure data shows. Then in February 2025, seizures plummeted even further to 590 pounds in 45 events.
Combined, those January and February numbers are 50% less than the same period in 2024 and among the very lowest monthlies recorded since 2020.

City of Scottsdale, AZ, police department.
Ranking administration officials, Border Patrol supervisors who hunt the drug on the ground, and media reporting from cartel laboratory-infested regions of Mexico tell us that March’s seizure numbers will solidify a reversal of a deadly decade-long upward fentanyl smuggling trend.
“Trump’s policies are having an impact, one hundred percent,” Acting Administrator of Trump’s Drug Enforcement Administration Derek Maltz told me for this Daily Wire story. And for Americans concerned about the scourge of fentanyl, there’s much more they will find surprising.
A Remarkable Display Of Cartel Pragmatism In Response To Trump

Derek S. Maltz, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Photo by Gabe Skidmore. Wikimedia Commons.
What Maltz said next almost defies commonly believed narratives about Mexico’s cartel crime syndicates — especially the idea that they are more impulsively violent than strategic and pragmatic. Yet, according to Maltz, cartel leaders appear to have opted for a surprising strategic change in the face of Trump’s campaign against them over fentanyl.
The cartels appear to have determined that since Trump is so bad for business, they have decided to quit smuggling it into the American market and send it to Europe and other parts of the world instead. What to do about the lost revenue? Easy. Make up the difference by shipping greater volumes of less-politically and physiologically lethal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, Maltz said.
“We got their attention with a lot of talk about the deaths in America, and the cartels got very concerned. It became a business decision.” Maltz told me.
Indeed, cartels in the fentanyl crosshairs are facing a unique, existential threat that no prior president in modern times has imposed, over just this one line of cartel business. While it’s too early for anyone to declare victory in Trump’s unprecedented war on fentanyl, Maltz attributes slowing fentanyl smuggling directly to Trump’s controversial 25% trade tariffs, which compelled the first Mexican military raids against production labs in Sinaloa Cartel-controlled Culiacán, Mexico.
After his November 2024 election win, Trump vowed to follow through with executive orders that would establish punishing tariffs on China for tolerating the export of precursor fentanyl-making chemicals to Mexico. And almost since inauguration day, Trump’s moves have compelled the destruction of laboratories.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
He designated nine Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations subject to global financial isolation, surveillance and terrorism charges for anyone who partners with them.
The cartels no doubt also felt heat from unspecified threats of possible U.S. military action against them and their labs. Indeed, Trump has increased U.S. spy flights over Mexico, repositioned CIA officers into Mexico, deployed war ships to the Pacific and Gulf of America, and put specialized light infantry divisions on the southern border facing Mexico.
An Unlikely Source Of Credit For Trump: The New York Times
As part of the Trump administration, Maltz might be expected to lose some credibility by crediting his boss’s policies for good news about fentanyl.
Maltz is hardly alone, however, in attributing Trump’s policies to early apparent success. Natalie Kitroeff, the New York Times’ Mexico City bureau chief toured some manufacturing labs in the city of Culiacán with another reporter in December 2024, the Sinaloa Cartel-controlled city believed to be Mexico’s central hub for manufacturing fentanyl with well over 100 labs.

Getty Images. View of the historic center of Culiacán, capital city of the state of Sinaloa, with the main Alvaro Obregón street that runs from north to south.
In a March 2025 interview on the newspaper’s The Daily podcast, Kitroeff said she returned to Culiacán after Trump’s inauguration “to see whether all of the pressure that Trump had put on Mexico had led to real changes, whether any of this actually made a difference.”
After serendipitously witnessing Mexican troops raiding labs as she drove through Culiacán on a follow-up trip, Kitroeff’s conclusion was clear.
“It was really remarkable. The dynamics, it seemed, had completely changed from the last time we were there,” she said, adding that her cartel sources “told us there was basically no production of fentanyl happening in the city. It had totally plummeted, fallen off a cliff” because “there is such an intense crackdown by the government right now.”
“Is this all because of Trump?” the show’s host Michael Barbaro asked Kitroeff.
“Yeah, I think that’s what it looks like to a lot of people, a lot of regular Mexicans, a lot of cartel members, and a lot of security experts who have been studying this for a long time,” she responded.
“I think it’s pretty clear that the amount of progress, arrests, raids, lab busts, the pace of these actions is something that we’ve not seen in recent history in Mexico. One analyst told us, we’ve seen in one month what we might have seen in years,” Kitroeff continued. “I think what we’ve seen is that at least in this context, in this month, and in this place, the tariffs worked, for now at least.”
The reporter and Maltz said production still goes on elsewhere in Mexico.
But Maltz said his government intelligence suggests the cartels are contemplating shipping the drug to Europe, Australia and to other wealthy developed countries but not as much to the United States because of the Trump heat.
“They’re going to produce it and ship it over that way instead,” he said. “There’s a very good chance that other parts of the world may be getting shipments of fentanyl from the cartels, unless they just curtail the production altogether, which I don’t see happening.”
He and others also note that U.S. law enforcement began seizing higher volumes of cocaine and methamphetamine smuggled over the border since Trump’s election instead of fentanyl, also suggesting a self-preserving cartel strategy change.
What About American Deaths?

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Another vital indicator that warrants tracking as a means to judge the long-term success of Trump’s muscular fentanyl initiatives: overdose deaths.
It’s just too early to know how the apparently falling smuggling rates translate into saved lives. Significant declines in overdose deaths began a year ago, according to the latest Center for Disease Control report on the subject, which lags real time by four months. Death rates fell by 24% for the 12 months through September 2024, from 114,000 to a still outrageous 87,000. The CDC attributes the decline to better life-saving treatment and awareness programs inside the United States but also to a factor it dubs without elaboration “shifts in the illegal drug supply.”

National Center for Health Statistics. CDC.
That factor almost assuredly is a reference to a secretive deal that President Joe Biden bartered for Mexico in December 2023 to deploy 35,000 troops with orders to militarily contain illegal immigration flows in deep southern Mexico to help Biden’s presidential reelection campaign defend its border policies against Trump. Mexico responded to Biden’s favor request with major impactful force throughout the Biden or Harris reelection campaign that dramatically reduced human smuggling, as I frequently reported, and also no doubt hindered some fentanyl smuggling.
Trump watchers and all Americans who authentically care about the extreme damage this drug from Mexico has wrought on the United States should hope seizures continue to plummet as this likely means less is getting smuggled over. But Americans deserve to know if “shifts in illegal drug supply” is saving far more American lives.
If that body count number alone continues an even faster decline, Trump will have earned his country’s enduring gratitude and a place of reverence in American history. So far, anyway, the early results give rise to optimism.
* * *
Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
Opinion
Some scientists advocate creating human bodies for ‘spare parts.’

From LifeSiteNews
The Stanford researchers admit that some people may find these ideas about clones repugnant but justify them on the basis of research already in progress.
In the 2005 sci-fi thriller The Island, Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor discover that they are clones, created as an “insurance policy” for wealthy people who might need them for “spare parts.” Now, scientists at Stanford are proposing that we make this dystopian fiction a reality. On March 25, 2025, Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi wrote in MIT Technology Review:
Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.
These researchers say that “human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.” Using techniques reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (in which fetuses destined for menial tasks are selectively poisoned to diminish their intelligence), they propose using human stem cells and artificial wombs to create human clones which they call “bodyoids.” The article describes it this way:
Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of “bodyoids”—a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.
The researchers say that these neurologically impaired human clones could provide an almost unlimited source of organs, tissues, and cells for use in transplantation. They admit that some people may find these ideas repugnant but justify them on the basis of research already in progress. They correctly point out that we are already using neurologically injured people as research test subjects.
“Brain dead” people who are biologically alive but who have been declared legally dead are currently being used as test hosts for the implantation of genetically modified pig livers and kidneys. These brain-injured people who are being used as xenograft hosts are certainly alive (since they are stable enough to be used as test subjects for implanted animal organs) until they are killed at the end of the experiment for further anatomical and microscopic analysis. The Stanford scientists use this ethically problematic practice to justify creating human clones for research: “In all these cases, nothing was, legally, a living human being at the time it was used for research. Human bodyoids would also fall into that category.”
The scientists admit that human cloning raises ethical problems, saying that the use of bodyoids “might diminish the human status of real people who lack consciousness or sentience.” But the article is clearly written in the spirit of the ends justifying the means. In their call for action, the authors conclude, “Caution is warranted, but so is bold vision; the opportunity is too important to ignore.”
On the contrary, the value of every human being is what is too important to ignore. We value and protect every person because they are made in the image of God, regardless of the way they were brought into the world. Using unconscious people as research subjects is wrong, both in the case of brain-injured people declared “legally dead” (under the logical fallacy of brain death), and also with this new proposal for bioengineering human clones. Salve Regina University philosopher Dr. Peter J. Colosi explains it this way:
You, as the person who you are, exist even when you are not conscious, and this means that other human beings who are not conscious could also do that. In the branch of philosophy that I am calling Christian personalism, there have been many convincing arguments developed to show the reasonableness of the presence of a person in all classes of nonconscious or minimally conscious living human beings.
Also, it is wrong to create people with the sole purpose of using them to fulfill our own desires. Dr. Colosi makes this clear:
Furthermore, the creation of human beings with the deliberate intent to destroy some of them for the sake of others…is a clear example of what Pope Francis has referred to as “The Throw Away Culture”: The throwaway culture says, “I use you as much as I need you. When I am not interested in you anymore, or you are in my way, I throw you out.” It is especially the weakest who are treated this way — unborn children, the elderly, the needy, and the disadvantaged.”
Creating people to be used as commodities for “spare parts” is unconscionable. Do we really want to be spending our taxpayer dollars this way? Yet Stanford Medicine’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education just received a $70 million NIH grant. The purpose of this grant is to “accelerate the translation of newly discovered biomedical treatments into interventions that improve patient care and population health.”
READ: The case of Zack Dunlap shows the incoherence of ‘brain death’
Rather than accelerating, we need to stop, expose, and defund these morally abhorrent attempts to purposely bioengineer neurologically impaired human clones as a source of “spare parts.” A pro-life ethic protects all human life from experimentation and abuse.
Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of The Brain Death Fallacy, and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
China Election Interference – Parties Received Security Briefing Days Ago as SITE Monitors Threats to Conservative Candidate Joe Tay
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
London-Based Human Rights Group Urges RCMP to Investigate Liberal MP for Possible Counselling of Kidnapping
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Joe Tay Says He Contacted RCMP for Protection, Demands Carney Fire MP Over “Bounty” Remark
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Hong Kong-Canadian Groups Demand PM Carney Drop Liberal Candidate Over “Bounty” Remark Supporting CCP Repression
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Beijing’s Echo Chamber in Parliament: Part 2 – Still No Action from Carney
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
RCMP Confirms It Is ‘Looking Into’ Alleged Foreign Threat Following Liberal Candidate Paul Chiang Comments
-
2025 Federal Election20 hours ago
PM Carney’s Candidate Paul Chiang Steps Down After RCMP Confirms Probe Into “Bounty” Comments