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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Why is Trudeau sticking to the unmarked graves falsehood?

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

There is simply no possibility that Trudeau didn’t know on June 17th, 2024 that he was spreading misinformation when he said that unmarked graves were found. In plain English — he knew he was lying.

The claim made by Chief Rosanne Casimir on May 27th, 2021, that the remains of 215 children, former students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) had been found in unmarked graves on the school grounds, was false.

Only soil anomalies were detected by a radar device. Those anomalies could be tree roots, previous excavations, or almost anything. In fact, research since that time makes it clear that the anomalies were almost certainly the trenches of a former septic field installed in 1924 to dispose of the school’s sewage.

No “unmarked graves”, “human remains”, “bodies” or “mass graves” were found.

Chief Casimir finally confessed to making that false claim three years after making it. She admitted what was known to most of all along: no graves, human remains, or bodies were found — only 215 “anomalies”.

So, everyone in Canada now knows that the May 27th, 2021 claim of unmarked graves containing human remains found at Kamloops was false. Everybody except the prime minister it seems, and his former Indigenous Affairs Minister, Marc Miller.

However on June 17th, 2024, Prime Minister Trudeau — instead of taking the opportunity to set the record straight — repeated at an indigenous event the whopper that “unmarked graves” have been found. He has been spreading that misinformation for three years.

One would think that now that the person who originally made the false claim has admitted that no graves were found — only anomalies — that Trudeau would take the opportunity to clear up the confusion and go with the truth, instead of repeating the original lie.

One would be wrong.

There is simply no possibility that Trudeau didn’t know on June 17th, 2024 that he was spreading misinformation when he said that unmarked graves were found. In plain English — he knew he was lying.

So, why would he do such a thing? Doesn’t a prime minister have a duty to refrain from deliberately lying to Canadian citizens? After all, the great majority of Canadians know by now that no graves were found at Kamloops.

The only answer that makes sense is that the Prime Minister was not speaking to all Canadians on June 17th, 2024. He was speaking only to indigenous Canadians when he falsely stated that unmarked graves had been found at Kamloops. He was repeating a lie they believed. They believed that lie in large part because he and Marc Miller were doing their best to keep the lie alive.

Everything that he and his colleagues have done since May 27, 2021 — lowering flags, kneeling with a teddy bear in an ordinary community cemetery, lavishing money on indigenous communities to search for missing children he knows were never “missing” — has been done to pander to an indigenous community that largely believes those false stories about evil priests and secret burials. I repeat  — believes that anti- Catholic bilge in large part because the Trudeau Liberals have encouraged them to believe it.

What has come to be known as the “Kamloops Graves Hoax” is now known to most Canadians for what it is — a false claim. However, we have a prime minister who, for his own reasons,  seems intent on keeping the hoax going within the indigenous community. The deception being practiced by the prime minister will have serious consequences in the years ahead. And those consequences are all negative.

Prime ministers come and go. Some remain popular throughout their term, but some become increasingly unpopular. For example, the late Brian Mulroney was so unpopular with Canadians toward the end of his term that the Conservatives, led by his successor, Kim Campbell, were  virtually wiped in the election following his retirement.

Trudeau’s fate remains to be seen.

However, that is just politics. But what Trudeau is doing, in deliberately lying to an already marginalized demographic that has a history of being lied to by indigenous and non-indigenous politicians, is not just politics. It is reprehensible conduct. Those people are going to be very angry when they realize that they have been deceived.

Under Trudeau’s watch, we have already seen churches burn, statues topple, and other mayhem as a result of a claim that the PMO knows is false.

Exactly why he is practicing this deception we do not know. We do know with certainty that Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller spoke with Chief Rosanne Casimir on the evening of May 27, 2021, immediately after she made her false claim that the remains of 215 children, who were students at KIRS, had been found. Here’s what he said about his May 27, 2021 telephone conversation with Casimir, according to Hansard:

“On Thursday evening, I spoke to Chief Casimir and assured her of my steadfast support for the grieving and reconciliation process over the coming weeks. We have been in contact since then as well. We will be there with them as they lead this initiative, and we will help meet their needs in the coming weeks and months.”

Unless Chief Casimir told Miller that “remains” had been found, and not the truth — that only anomalies had been detected — the Trudeau government and the Kamloops band together, for reasons unknown, created the false narrative that the remains of 215 children had been found, knowing that their claim was false. Why did this happen?

The prime minister is now keeping this false narrative alive, knowing that it was, and is, false. Why is he doing this?.

And why are the CBC and our mainstream media not even trying to find out?

Something is very wrong here.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Business

It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

The Cost of Underselling Canadian Oil and Gas to the USA

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Canadians can now track in real time how much revenue the country is forfeiting to the United States by selling its oil at discounted prices, thanks to a new online tracker from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The tracker shows the billions in revenue lost due to limited access to distribution for Canadian oil.

At a time of economic troubles and commercial tensions with the United States, selling our oil at a discount to U.S. middlemen who then sell it in the open markets at full price will rob Canada of nearly $19 billion this year, said Marco Navarro-Genie, the VP of Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Navarro-Genie led the team that designed the counter.

The gap between world market prices and what Canada receives is due to the lack of Canadian infrastructure.

According to a recent analysis by Ian Madsen, senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre, the lack of international export options forces Canadian producers to accept prices far below the world average. Each day this continues, the country loses hundreds of millions in potential revenue. This is a problem with a straightforward remedy, said David Leis, the Centre’s President. More pipelines need to be approved and built.

While the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline has helped, more is needed. It commenced commercial operations on May 1, 2024, nearly tripling Canada’s oil export capacity westward from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels daily. This expansion gives Canadian oil producers access to broader global markets, including Asia and the U.S. West Coast, potentially reducing the price discount on Canadian crude.

This is more than an oil story. While our oil price differential has long been recognized, there’s growing urgency around our natural gas exports. The global demand for cleaner energy, including Canadian natural gas, is climbing. Canada exports an average of 12.3 million GJ of gas daily. Yet, we can still not get the full value due to infrastructure bottlenecks, with losses of over $7.3 billion (2024). A dedicated counter reflecting these mounting gas losses underscores how critical this issue is.

“The losses are not theoretical numbers,” said Madsen. “This is real money, and Canadians can now see it slipping away, second by second.”

The Frontier Centre urges policymakers and industry leaders to recognize the economic urgency and ensure that infrastructure projects like TMX are fully supported and efficiently utilized to maximize Canada’s oil export potential. The webpage hosting the counter offers several examples of what the lost revenue could buy for Canadians. A similar counter for gas revenue lost through similarly discounted gas exports will be added in the coming days.

What Could Canada Do With $25.6 Billion a Year?

Without greater pipeline capacity, Canada loses an estimated (2025) $25.6 billion by selling our oil and gas to the U.S. at a steep discount. That money could be used in our communities — funding national defence, hiring nurses, supporting seniors, building schools, and improving infrastructure. Here’s what we’re giving up by underselling these natural resources. 

342,000 Nurses

The average annual salary for a registered nurse in Canada is about $74,958. These funds could address staffing shortages and improve patient care nationwide.
Source

39,000 New Housing Units

At an estimated $472,000 per unit (excluding land costs, based on Toronto averages), $25.6 billion could fund nearly 94,000 affordable housing units.
Source

About the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is an independent Canadian think-tank that researches and analyzes public policy issues, including energy, economics and governance.

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