National
Graves and school murders? What were we thinking?

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
The year 2021 was the year of the Kamloops graves.
It was the top news story of the year. It was reported by CBC and all mainstream media that ground penetrating radar had detected remains of 215 indigenous children who were found buried in the old apple orchard on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The burials had taken place in secrecy in the middle of the night. Priests and nuns, who were apparently responsible for the deaths, wanted to hide the results of their crimes and forced students, “as young as six” to dig the graves of their dead classmates.
Indigenous leaders claimed there were tens of thousands more murdered and secretly buried indigenous children across the length and breadth of Canada — children who “went to residential school and never returned.”
The Trudeau government ordered flags flown at half mast, where they remained for six months. It made $320,000,000 available to indigenous communities that wanted to search for more missing children. Many accepted the offer.
2023 was the year this whole story fell apart.
There were no secretly buried children.
There were no “thousands of missing children.”
The junior ground penetrating radar operator, Sarah Beaulieu, who made her sensational claim in 2021, had most likely mistaken the remnants of 1924 septic field trenches for graves.
The indigenous children who died at residential schools mostly died of tuberculosis, as did those who never attended a residential school. Most were buried on their home reserves and their burial places had simply been forgotten.
Simply put, all of the hysteria of 2021 over secret burials and missing children was for nothing. Canada had fallen for the biggest fake news story in the history of the nation.
A new book of essays by Professor Tom Flanagan and CP Champion examines how this false story took hold and how it was debunked.
Tom Flanagan is Canada’s foremost expert on indigenous issues. Champion is the editor of the Dorchester Review, where many of these valuable essays can be found.
The essays tell the story of how Canadians fell for a story that made no sense from the outset. Why would priests kill and secretly bury children? There was no historical record of any such events ever happening.
If the children went to the residential school “and never returned” wouldn’t there be some record of such a thing happening — a parent complaining, a police report, a complaint to a chief etc.? But there was no such thing.
The odd thing is that neither CBC nor practically any other reporter asked any such questions. They not only repeated the false claims, they amplified and exaggerated them. So 215 “soil disturbances” (which is what the radar had detected) became “human remains,” “bodies,, “graves” and even “mass graves.”
Conrad Black wrote the foreword to the book. Black is one of the few Canadians who recognized from the outset the Kamloops claim was absurd. Black was also one of the few writers who has consistently denounced the disgraceful claim that Canada is guilty of any kind of genocide.
He properly criticized former Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin when she first put forward the baseless claim in 2015 and he has consistently defended Canada against such slander.
The writers (disclosure: I am one) systematically take apart the false Kamloops and copycat claims. Professor Jacques Rouillard, using research done by Nina Green proves the deaths of the KIRS students who died while enrolled at the school were properly documented, that the deaths were mainly from the diseases of the day and that the children were almost all buried on their home reserves.
These children had not been buried in secrecy, they were never “missing” and there was absolutely nothing sinister about their deaths.
Children from the community who attended day schools, or didn’t attend school at all, died in similar numbers from the same diseases. Death from disease was simply a sad fact of life and had nothing to do with whether or not a child attended a residential school.
The only “evidence” that could possibly support the secret burial thesis — apart from the usual conspiracy theories that are told in every community — was the report from Sarah Beaulieu of soil disturbances detected by ground penetrating radar that she opined could be possible graves.
However, on closer inspection these claims fall apart. The authors expose Beaulieu’s negligence in failing to research previous excavations before recklessly venturing an opinion on such an important matter.
Her other mistaken assumptions, such as false reports about a child’s tooth and bone, are also exposed. It is noteworthy the T’kemlups Band originally promised to release Beaulieu’s report to the public but reneged on that promise when it became apparent the report was unreliable, just as they have reneged on their stated intention to excavate.
The other essays examine the other claims made about evil priests, secret burials and missing children. The authors systematically dissect the claims, and expose them as the false claims that they are.
As for the claim there are “thousands of missing children” who are alleged to have entered residential schools “and never returned” to their parents, and now lie in “unmarked graves” Professor Flanagan puts it succinctly: These are not “missing children” — they are “forgotten children.” They now lie in unmarked graves for the simple reasons that their families didn’t keep up their gravesites and forgot about them.
The current grave-searching mania now occurring in indigenous communities is fueled by the $320,000,000 that then Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller dangled before poor indigenous communities like golden carrots.
Other essays in the book examine other common misconceptions about residential schools, generally. One of the most persistent is the claim — consistently made by CBC for two decades — that “150,000 children were forced to attend” residential schools.
This claim is completely untrue.
Prior to 1920, status Indian parents were not required by law to send their children to any school — and most didn’t. After 1920, status Indian parents could choose between sending their children to day schools or residential schools. It is only where no day school was available that parents were required to send their children to residential schools.
But even then, there was seldom enforcement of that law. Only in the case of orphans or severe child neglect (usually due to alcohol abuse) was parental consent dispensed with (for obvious reasons).
CBC has been advised of their repeated reporting error, but continues to push this misinformation. Their justification for doing so is a word salad of obfuscation that is either meant to mislead or shows incompetence on their part.
In sum, the hysteria following the May 2021 announcement 215 “graves” had been discovered at Kamloops is not something that is easily explained. Why most Canadians seemed willing to accept such a preposterous claim in the first place will be a subject for historians and psychologists for decades.
Why the Trudeau government — without a shred of real evidence — ordered flags lowered for months; why the CBC and other mainstream media failed to ask even the most elementary questions about claims that they must have known were false; why indigenous leaders decided to put forward a false narrative that they must have known would eventually be exposed as a fraud — these are all questions examined in the revealing essays in this important book.
Although CBC — and even government publications — continue to put out fatuous claims about “graves,” “probable graves” and “human remains” the international community concluded some time ago that Canada succumbed to some kind of mass hysteria in May 2021, when the preposterous Kamloops claim was first made.
Was this national gullibility related to the strange lockdown years? Was it “Canada’s George Floyd moment? Was it “Canada’s woke nightmare?”
These are questions readers can ask themselves when reading these essays. Professor Flanagan and Chris Champion deserve a lot of credit for swimming against a tide of wokeness to put out this important book.
They are part of a research group — not afraid to be called “deniers” — who wrote the essays published in the book and initiated the Indian Residential School Research Group where additional information can be found.
For original documents and primary sources readers can go to indianresidentialschoolrecords.com.
In May of 2021, Canadians fell for “fake news”. There is an old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”.
This book should be read with that saying in mind.
Together with the question: “What were we thinking?”
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Business
Saskatchewan becomes first Canadian province to fully eliminate carbon tax

From LifeSiteNews
Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian province to free itself entirely of the carbon tax.
On March 27, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the removal of the provincial industrial carbon tax beginning April 1, boosting the province’s industry and making Saskatchewan the first carbon tax free province.
Under Moe’s direction, Saskatchewan has dropped the industrial carbon tax which he says will allow Saskatchewan to thrive under a “tariff environment.”
“I would hope that all of the parties running in the federal election would agree with those objectives and allow the provinces to regulate in this area without imposing the federal backstop,” he continued.
The removal of the tax is estimated to save Saskatchewan residents up to 18 cents a liter in gas prices.
The removal of the tax will take place on April 1, the same day the consumer carbon tax will reduce to 0 percent under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction. Notably, Carney did not scrap the carbon tax legislation: he just reduced its current rate to zero. This means it could come back at any time.
Furthermore, while Carney has dropped the consumer carbon tax, he has previously revealed that he wishes to implement a corporation carbon tax, the effects of which many argued would trickle down to all Canadians.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) celebrated Moe’s move, noting that the carbon tax was especially difficult on farmers.
“I think the carbon tax has been in place for approximately six years now coming up in April and the cost keeps going up every year,” SARM president Bill Huber said.
“It puts our farming community and our business people in rural municipalities at a competitive disadvantage, having to pay this and compete on the world stage,” he continued.
“We’ve got a carbon tax on power — and that’s going to be gone now — and propane and natural gas and we use them more and more every year, with grain drying and different things in our farming operations,” he explained.
“I know most producers that have grain drying systems have three-phase power. If they haven’t got natural gas, they have propane to fire those dryers. And that cost goes on and on at a high level, and it’s made us more noncompetitive on a world stage,” Huber decalred.
The carbon tax is wildly unpopular and blamed for the rising cost of living throughout Canada. Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $80 per tonne.
2025 Federal Election
Mark Carney refuses to clarify 2022 remarks accusing the Freedom Convoy of ‘sedition’

From LifeSiteNews
Mark Carney described the Freedom Convoy as an act of ‘sedition’ and advocated for the government to use its power to crush the non-violent protest movement.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney refused to elaborate on comments he made in 2022 referring to the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protest as an act of “sedition” and advocating for the government to put an end to the movement.
“Well, look, I haven’t been a politician,” Carney said when a reporter in Windsor, Ontario, where a Freedom Convoy-linked border blockade took place in 2022, asked, “What do you say to Canadians who lost trust in the Liberal government back then and do not have trust in you now?”
“I became a politician a little more than two months ago, two and a half months ago,” he said. “I came in because I thought this country needed big change. We needed big change in the economy.”
Carney’s lack of an answer seems to be in stark contrast to the strong opinion he voiced in a February 7, 2022, column published in the Globe & Mail at the time of the convoy titled, “It’s Time To End The Sedition In Ottawa.”
In that piece, Carney wrote that the Freedom Convoy was a movement of “sedition,” adding, “That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”
Carney went on to claim in the piece that if “left unchecked” by government authorities, the Freedom Convoy would “achieve” its “goal of undermining our democracy.”
Carney even targeted “[a]nyone sending money to the Convoy,” accusing them of “funding sedition.”
Internal emails from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) eventually showed that his definition of sedition were not in conformity with the definition under Canada’s Criminal Code, which explicitly lists the “use of force” as a necessary aspect of sedition.
“The key bit is ‘use of force,’” one RCMP officer noted in the emails. “I’m all about a resolution to this and a forceful one with us victorious but, from the facts on the ground, I don’t know we’re there except in a small number of cases.”
Another officer replied with, “Agreed,” adding that “It would be a stretch to say the trucks barricading the streets and the air horns blaring at whatever decibels for however many days constitute the ‘use of force.’”
The reality is that the Freedom Convoy was a peaceful event of public protest against COVID mandates, and not one protestor was charged with sedition. However, the Liberal government, then under Justin Trudeau, did take an approach similar to the one advocated for by Carney, invoking the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters. Since then, a federal judge has ruled that such action was “not justified.”
Despite this, the two most prominent leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, still face a possible 10-year prison sentence for their role in the non-violent assembly. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.
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