National
Despite claims of 215 ‘unmarked graves,’ no bodies have been found at Canadian residential school
From LifeSiteNews
Over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized since the Trudeau government and mainstream media promulgated, without any physical evidence, the narrative that mass ‘unmarked graves’ had been discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has confirmed it has spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a now-closed residential school once run by the Catholic Church, despite the fact that no human remains have been found.
In total, some $7.9 million was earmarked for a search of unmarked Indian Residential School graves in Kamloops, British Columbia. According to the spokeswoman for the Crown-Indigenous Relations, Carolane Gratton, the community got the money “for field work, records searches and to secure the Residential School grounds.”
“Details of initiatives taken by Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation are best directed to the community,” noted Gratton.
To date, the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has not given a financial accounting under the Access To Information Act as to where the money went. According to the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, it “continues to grieve children that are in our care and are focused on the scientific work that needs to be done,” but made no mention of the $7.9 million.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021, when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence, but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar.
The money given to the First Nation was done so to find the “heartbreaking truth” of the residential school system, according to a 2022 Indian Residential School Sites: Unmarked Burials department briefing note.
“Our thoughts are with survivors, their families and communities as the heartbreaking truth about Residential Schools’ unmarked burials continues to be unveiled,” read the note.
“Funding is available to support communities, survivors and their families on their healing journey through researching, locating and memorializing those children who died while attending Indian Residential Schools.”
Canadian indigenous residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set-up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.
While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the past wrongs led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, which boiled over in the summer of 2021 after the discovery of the 215 so-called “unmarked” graves in Kamloops.
While some children did die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children tragically passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to the federal government, not the Catholic Church, failing to properly fund the system.
No human remains have been found
Soon after the Kamloops announcement in 2021, other regions claimed the presence of “unmarked graves,” which prompted Canada’s House of Commons under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with the help of all other parties including the Conservatives, to declare the residential school program a “genocide” despite the lack of evidence.
The reality is that to date, no human remains have been found at the Kamloops site or other sites.
In fact, in August 2023, the Pine Creek Residential School, located in Pine Creek, Manitoba, underwent a four-week excavation and yielded no remains.
The excavation was led by a First Nation’s tribe called Minegoziibe Ashinabe, and came after a total of 14 abnormalities were found at the former school by ground-penetrating radar.
There have been other excavations conducted at residential schools that have likewise turned up no human remains.
Since the spring of 2021, over 100 churches, mostly Catholic, have been burned or vandalized across Canada. The attacks on the churches came shortly after the “unmarked graves” narrative began.
Despite the church burnings, the federal government under Trudeau has done nothing substantial to bring those responsible to justice or to stem the root cause of the burnings.
“I think Canadians have seen with horror those unmarked graves across the country and realize that what happened decades ago isn’t part of our history, it is an irrefutable part of our present,” Trudeau had earlier remarked to reporters.
The unmarked graves controversy also spurred a Senate committee in 2023 to claim that anyone who questions the graves is engaged in “Residential School denialism.”
“Denialism serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials and unmarked graves,” said a Senate Indigenous peoples committee report titled Honouring The Children Who Never Came Home.
The Senate committee report said that the Canadian government should “take every action necessary to combat the rise of Residential School denialism.”
Jordan Peterson tells Pope Francis to ‘take note’
Responding to reports about the Trudeau government spending nearly $8 million without finding a single body, renowned anti-woke Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson took a shot at Pope Francis.
“Pope Francis take note @Pontifex,” wrote Peterson on X (formerly Twitter) last Thursday.
Pope Francis take note @Pontifex https://t.co/YAyKDtMa4A
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 9, 2024
Peterson’s remarks likely came in light of the fact that Francis visited Canada in the summer of 2022 for the purpose of apologizing for churchmen’s role in the operation of the residential school program.
During his July 2022 trip, Francis visited First Nations in Alberta and Quebec. While in Quebec, he seemed to join in on a pagan “smudging” ritual before giving a lengthy speech where he conveyed “deep shame and sorrow” for the role played by Catholic Church members in government-funded residential school abuses.
While Francis seemed to go along with the mainstream narrative regarding residential schools, others have spoken out.
Last year, retired Bishop of Calgary, Frederick Henry, blasted the blatant “lie” that thousands of missing indigenous children who attended residential schools run by the Catholic Church were somehow “clandestinely” murdered by “Catholic priests and nuns.”
The founder of the National Post, Conrad Black, also made similar statements as Henry in an opinion piece for his former paper, calling the entire narrative a “fraud.”
Business
Trump, taunts and trade—Canada’s response is a decade out of date
From the Fraser Institute
Canadian federal politicians are floundering in their responses to Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a 2016 mindset, still thinking Trump is a temporary aberration who should be disdained and ignored by the global community. But a lot has changed. Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s current priorities should spend less time looking at trade statistics and more time understanding the details of the lawfare campaigns against him. Canadian officials who had to look up who Kash Patel is, or who don’t know why Nathan Wade’s girlfriend finds herself in legal jeopardy, will find the next four years bewildering.
Three years ago, Trump was on the ropes. His first term had been derailed by phony accusations of Russian collusion and a Ukrainian quid pro quo. After 2020, the Biden Justice Department and numerous Democrat prosecutors devised implausible legal theories to launch multiple criminal cases against him and people who worked in his administration. In summer 2022, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and leaked to the press rumours of stolen nuclear codes and theft of government secrets. After Trump announced his candidacy in 2022, he was hit by wave after wave of indictments and civil suits strategically filed in deep blue districts. His legal bills soared while his lawyers past and present battled well-funded disbarment campaigns aimed at making it impossible for him to obtain counsel. He was assessed hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties and faced life in prison if convicted.
This would have broken many men. But when he was mug-shotted in Georgia on Aug. 24, 2023, his scowl signalled he was not giving in. In the 11 months from that day to his fist pump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump managed to defeat and discredit the lawfare attacks, assemble and lead a highly effective campaign team, knock Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket, run a series of near daily (and sometimes twice daily) rallies, win over top business leaders in Silicon Valley, open up a commanding lead in the polls and not only survive an assassination attempt but turn it into an image of triumph. On election day, he won the popular vote and carried the White House and both Houses of Congress.
It’s Trump’s world now, and Canadians should understand two things about it. First, he feels no loyalty to domestic and multilateral institutions that have governed the world for the past half century. Most of them opposed him last time and many were actively weaponized against him. In his mind, and in the thinking of his supporters, he didn’t just defeat the Democrats, he defeated the Republican establishment, most of Washington including the intelligence agencies, the entire corporate media, the courts, woke corporations, the United Nations and its derivatives, universities and academic authorities, and any foreign governments in league with the World Economic Forum. And it isn’t paranoia; they all had some role in trying to bring him down. Gaining credibility with the new Trump team will require showing how you have also fought against at least some of these groups.
Second, Trump has earned the right to govern in his own style, including saying whatever he wants. He’s a negotiator who likes trash-talking, so get used to it and learn to decode his messages.
When Trump first threatened tariffs, he linked it to two demands: stop the fentanyl going into the United States from Canada and meet our NATO spending targets. We should have done both long ago. In response, Trudeau should have launched an immediate national action plan on military readiness, border security and crackdowns on fentanyl labs. His failure to do so invited escalation. Which, luckily, only consisted of taunts about annexation. Rather than getting whiny and defensive, the best response (in addition to dealing with the border and defence issues) would have been to troll back by saying that Canada would fight any attempt to bring our people under the jurisdiction of the corrupt U.S. Department of Justice, and we will never form a union with a country that refuses to require every state to mandate photo I.D. to vote and has so many election problems as a result.
As to Trump’s complaints about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, this is a made-in-Washington problem. The U.S. currently imports $4 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world but only sells $3 trillion back in exports. Trump looks at that and says we’re ripping them off. But that trillion-dollar difference shows up in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts as the capital account balance. The rest of the world buys that much in U.S. financial instruments each year, including treasury bills that keep Washington functioning. The U.S. savings rate is not high enough to cover the federal government deficit and all the other domestic borrowing needs. So the Americans look to other countries to cover the difference. Canada’s persistent trade surplus with the U.S. ($108 billion in 2023) partly funds that need. Money that goes to buying financial instruments can’t be spent on goods and services.
So the other response to the annexation taunts should be to remind Trump that all the tariffs in the world won’t shrink the trade deficit as long as Congress needs to borrow so much money each year. Eliminate the budget deficit and the trade deficit will disappear, too. And then there will be less money in D.C. to fund lawfare and corruption. Win-win.
Business
Trade retaliation might feel good—but it will hurt Canada’s economy
From the Fraser Institute
To state the obvious, president-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose an across-the-board 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports to the United States has gotten the attention of Canadian policymakers who are considering ways to retaliate.
Reportedly, if Trump makes good on his tariff threat, the federal government may levy retaliatory tariffs on a wide range of American-made goods including orange juice, ceramic products such as sinks and toilets, and some steel products. And NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he wants Canada to block exports of critical minerals such as aluminum, lithium and potash to the United States, saying that if Trump “wants to pick a fight with Canada, we have to make sure it’s clear that it’s going to hurt Americans as well.”
Indeed, the ostensible goal of tariff retaliation is to inflict economic damage on producers and workers in key U.S. jurisdictions while minimizing harm to Canadian consumers of products imported from the U.S. The hope is that there will be sufficient political blowback from Canada’s retaliation that Republican members of Congress will eventually view Trump’s tariffs as an unacceptable risk to their re-election and pressure him to roll them back.
But while Canadians might feel good about tit-for-tat retaliation against Trump’s trade bullying and taunting, it might well make things worse for the Canadian economy. For example, even selective tariffs will increase the cost of living for Canadians as importers of tariffed U.S. goods pass the tax along to domestic consumers. Retaliatory tariffs might also harm productivity growth in Canada by encouraging increased domestic production of goods that are produced relatively inefficiently here at home compared to in the U.S. Make no mistake—once trade protections are put in place, the beneficiaries have a strong vested interest in having the protections maintained indefinitely. While Trump will be gone in four years, tariffs imposed by Ottawa to retaliate against his actions will likely remain in place for longer.
The U.S. president has substantial leeway under existing legislation to implement trade measures such as tariffs. While Trump has several legislative options to impose new tariffs against Canada and Mexico, he’ll likely use the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), which grants the president power to regulate imports and impose duties in response to an emergency involving any unusual and extraordinary threat to national security, foreign policy or the economy. According to Trump’s rhetoric, the emergency is illegal immigration and drug traffic originating in Canada and Mexico.
However risible Trump’s emergency claim might be when applied to Canada, overturning any action under the IEEPA, or some other enabling legislation, would require a legal challenge. And in fact, because no president has yet used the IEEPA to impose tariffs, the legality of Trump’s actions remains in doubt. In this context, a group of governors sympathetic to Canada’s position (and their own political fortunes) might spearhead a legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs with encouragement and support from the Canadian government.
To be sure, any legal challenge would take time to work its way through the U.S. court system. But it will likely also take time for domestic opposition to Trump’s tariffs to gain sufficient political momentum to effect any change. Indeed, given the current composition of Congress, it’s far from clear that a Team Canada effort to rally broad anti-tariff support among U.S. politicians and business leaders would bear fruit while Trump is in office.
While direct retaliation might be emotionally satisfying to Canadians, it would likely do more economic harm than good. And while a legal challenge will not obviate the immediate economic harm Canada will suffer from Trump’s tariffs, it might help limit the ability of Trump (and any future president) to use trade policy for political leverage in our bilateral relationship. After all, there’s no guarantee that the next president will not be a Trump acolyte.
-
Daily Caller1 day ago
Biden Pardons His Brother Jim And Other Family Members Just Moments Before Trump’s Swearing-In
-
Artificial Intelligence2 days ago
Canadian Court Upholds Ban on Clearview AI’s Unconsented Facial Data Collection
-
Catherine Herridge2 days ago
Return of the Diet Coke Button
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days ago
WEF Davos 2025: Attendees at annual meeting wrestling for control of information
-
Business2 days ago
TikTok Restores Service After US Shutdown Amid Trump Deal
-
Business1 day ago
Freeland and Carney owe Canadians clear answer on carbon taxes
-
Business1 day ago
UK lawmaker threatens to use Online Safety Act to censor social media platforms
-
International1 day ago
Biden preemptively pardons Fauci, Cheney, Milley on way out