Down the road, Chief Willie Sellars, of the Williams Lake indigenous community, outdid the rhetoric of his colleague, Chief Casimir. According to Sellars, priests had not only killed countless indigenous children, but had thrown their bodies into “rivers, streams and lakes” as well as the usual old standards of throwing bodies into school furnaces and incinerators. Other communities wanting in on the money jumped onto the bandwagon with increasingly fantastical tales.

The result of this Trudeau government recklessness — aided by a gullible media that asked no questions  — was predictable. These false stories became etched in stone as the truth within the indigenous community. A victim mentality that was already deeply imbedded became pathological, as indigenous communities became convinced — on evidence that was entirely false — that they were victims of a genocide committed by their neighbours.

The chiefs also silenced the many thoughtful members within their communities who knew that these stories of murderous priests were not true. As investigative reporter, Terry Glavin, explains, even among the Tk’emlups community there were always sensible voices who did not believe those claims:

“From the outset, even among Tk’emlúps people there was a great deal of skepticism and disbelief in stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates under the light of the moon”

But instead of heeding those sensible indigenous voices, and even as it became increasingly clear to Canadians that these stories were just tall tales, there was so much money in it that the chiefs doubled down. They insisted that Canadians must pretend to believe that the claims were true.

That would be their price for “reconciliation”.

As noted above, the weak Liberal government gave into this blackmail by removing the funding cap on searches it had tried to impose. But other important institutions cravenly played along with what was now an officially sanctioned lie as well.

Jon Kay explains in his recent Quillette essay how the Law Society of British Columbia is now insisting that anyone who wants to be a lawyer in that province must pretend to believe the “evil priest” line of stories.

Other law schools and law societies across Canada are doing this as well. They are so focused on what they perceive as the holy grail of “reconciliation” that they are prepared to sacrifice a pursuit of truth as their goal, and force their own students — our future lawyers and judges —  to do the same.

Our public schools — to bring about “reconciliation — are indoctrinating our children with lessons about the “215 Kamloops graves” and other misinformation, such as the  “Charlie Wenjack” story.

Children are taught that Wenjack was abused by Catholic priests and nuns in his residential school, and ran away as a result.

In fact, as author and historian Robert MacBain explains in his important book, “The Lonely Death Of An Ojibway Boy” Charlie Wenjack lived at a Protestant hostel run by a kindly indigenous family, attended school by the day in Kenora, and probably never saw a residential school, or met a priest or nun, in his life.

But, in the interests of “reconciliation” our children are being misinformed by their teachers.

And when a teacher does dare to tell the truth, as when B.C. teacher, Jim McMurtry told his students that the children who died in residential schools died of the diseases of the day — and were not tortured to death, as was being reported — he was frogmarched from his classroom, and summarily fired.

Or Frances Widdowson, who was fired from her tenured university position largely for daring to dispute what was becoming an increasingly extreme residential school narrative.

All of this obvious unfairness, is happening in the name of “reconciliation.” The senior lawyers who oversee the Law Society, and the educators who select our children’s school curricula  are doing a great disservice to this country. As are our MPs who foolishly labelled Canada as genocidal, based on the same false Kamloops claim.

As are our senior indigenous leaders, who know by know that the murderous, secret-burying priest story has always been just a silly ghost story that children tell to scare  one another. Yet they insist that Canadians must pretend to believe it, or they will withhold the “reconciliation” that they wield like a sledge hammer over our heads.

It should have occurred to everyone by now that if the price of “reconciliation” is pretending to believe a lie, the price is far too high. That kind of “reconciliation” is worth nothing.

In actual fact, what this country and its indigenous population needs is not “reconciliation” at all. Too many indigenous people are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. What they need is not “reconciliation” but integration into the economy, and the opportunity to participate in it. As for the opportunists who exploit a false claim to benefit themselves, they deserve only our contempt.

What nobody needs is a country where citizens must lie to each other in order to stay together.

And now, to add insult to injury, MP Leah Gazan wants to make it a law that we must all lie to each other by criminalizing what she calls “residential school denialism”. She specifically singles out the Kamloops claim as something Canadians must accept as true. As she sees it any Canadian who refuses to do so, or who dares to suggest that the positives, as well as the negatives of residential schooling should be recognized, should be made a criminal. Dostoevsky famously asked if there will come a time “when intelligent people will be banned from thinking, so as not to offend the imbeciles”. Has that time arrived?