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Retired judge slams Trudeau gov’t for promoting ‘false’ accusation about residential school deaths

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Retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht observed that allegations were made with ‘no real evidence’ and that reports ‘that thousands of indigenous children had died at residential schools under suspicious circumstances’ are patently ‘false.’

A retired Canadian judge blasted what he said is a “conspiracy theory” lie and “shocking” yet unproven “accusation” being pushed by the Liberal federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and legacy media that thousands of Indigenous residential school kids died due to negligence by the Catholic priests and nuns.

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accused Canadian priests, nuns, teachers, and staff at residential schools of somehow being responsible for the disappearance of thousands of indigenous children who attended the schools. That is a shocking accusation,” retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht wrote in a commentary piece published in the Western Standard last week.

“But it is even more shocking that the accusation was made with no real evidence to support it.”

Giesbrecht observed that reports from TRC commissioners that “that thousands of indigenous children had died at residential schools under suspicious circumstances” are patently “false.”

“Those allegations were false, and based on a conspiracy theory,” Giesbrecht said.

The judge lamented the fact that hundreds of Christian (mostly Catholic) churches have been burned to the ground since the first TRC report came out in 2010, with more than 100 being reduced to ashes since 2021.

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media and federal government 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 First Nation now has changed its claim of 215 graves to 200 “potential burials.”

“Where did that Tk’emlups story come from? Most importantly, why would anyone believe such obvious nonsense?” he wrote.

According to Giesbrecht, the “conspiracy theory that launched the entire missing children claim” came from a “largely created” claim by defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett.

“For reasons that defy rational explanation this unusual man made it his life’s work to take the alcoholic ramblings of a few Vancouvers east side street residents, polish them up, and present them as fact to the world,” the retired justice wrote.

Giesbrecht gave an example of how Annett repeated the story that “Queen Elizabeth had kidnapped 10 children from the Kamloops school, and those children were never seen again,” but was later exposed by an investigative reporter.

According to Giesbrecht, Annett “repeated stories about priests clubbing students to death and throwing them into graves dug by other students, dead boys hanging on meat hooks in barns, and babies thrown into furnaces by priests and nuns.”

“Respected investigative reporter Terry Glavin exposed Annett as a crank and debunked Annett’s wild stories in detail in a 2008 Tyee article. Annett’s stories are so obviously fake that it seems incredible that anyone believed them,” he said.

Giesbrecht noted that it is “hard” to believe that anyone thought the defrocked pastor’s tales were true, but the truth is, people “did” fall for it.

“In fact, some of the people who fell for these stories occupied important positions. One was Gary Merasty, a Member of Parliament. Merasty became so convinced that these claims, as presented in Kevin Annett’s most famous documentary, ‘Unrepentant’ were true, that he was able to convince the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and other important politicians that the newly appointed TRC commissioners must investigate Annett’s claims,” he said.

According to Giesbrecht, the newly appointed TRC commissioners had “unwisely accepted this new area of study, despite the fact that they had no mandate to do so.”

“When the federal government refused their request for a mandate and funds to search for these phantom ‘missing children’ they ignored the rebuff, and pursued the subject anyway,” he wrote.

“It appears from their statements on the subject that they completely bought into the Annett conspiracy theory. Commissioner Murray Sinclair gave many interviews about these supposedly “missing children” and hinted frequently that dark forces were at play.

LifeSiteNews reported last week that Leah Gazan, backbencher MP from the New Democratic Party, brought forth a new bill that seeks to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system once operating in Canada was a “genocide.”

Media and Trudeau feds worked together to create unproven claims, says judge

Giesbrecht observed that the mainstream media, meanwhile, did not “question any of these always improbable claims,” and “quite the contrary, they not only played along with these baseless claims, but actively encouraged them.”

“It did not seem to occur to them that they were actively supporting a conspiracy theory,” he noted.

The retired judge noted that “Trudeau and his ministers,” notably Marc Miller, “made matters immeasurably worse by immediately ordering all federal flags to be flown at half mast and promising enormous amounts of money to any other indigenous community that wanted to make a similar claim.”

“The truth is that the TRC’s missing children wild goose chase had thoroughly captivated journalists and entire indigenous communities to the extent that the baseless Tk’emlups claim seemed to make sense to them. Justin Trudeau and his ministers were in that gaggle of gullibles. Canada became the laughing stock of the world for dumbly accepting these wild claims,” he wrote.

Giesbrecht observed how since the unfounded claims exploded on the Canadian media and political scene, both the “Trudeau government” and the state-funded “CBC have doubled down on their refusal to correct the misinformation that they have promoted.”

He warned that the next “logical step” for the Trudeau Liberals and mainstream media “is to stop Canadians from even knowing about” the truth of residential schools, as well as for those who have been muzzled or speaking out.

LifeSiteNews reported in August that Trudeau’s cabinet said it will expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward documenting claims that hundreds of young children died and were clandestinely buried at now-closed residential schools, some of them run by the Catholic Church.

Canadian indigenous residential schools, run by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were set up by the federal government and were open from the late 19th century until 1996.

While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.

Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Jamil Jivani has urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down, saying the recent rash of destruction is a “very serious issue” that is a direct “attack” on families as well as “religious freedom in Canada.”

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Retired judge slams Trudeau gov’t for promoting ‘false’ accusation about residential school deaths

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Trudeau gov’t suggests federal funding of media outlets an attempt to buy ‘social cohesion’

Published on October 7, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The Liberal-run Heritage Department is backing a program that offers 100% payroll rebates for mainstream journalists.

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s department admitted that federally funded media outlets buy “social cohesion.”

According to information obtained October 7 by Blacklock’s Reporter, the Canadian Association of Journalists praised a program from Canada’s Heritage Department, run by the Liberal St-Onge, that offers 100% payroll rebates for mainstream journalists.

“The crisis in local journalism is a threat to social cohesion,” the report claimed, failing to explain what it meant by “social cohesion.”

The report praised the Local Journalism Initiative and the rebates for mainstream media up to $19.6 million annually, effectively making federally funded journalists government employees.

“The Local Journalism Initiative contributes to social cohesion by having journalists tell stories about and for communities,” the report continued. “Local journalism helps to preserve a sense of community identity and social cohesion.”

“Local journalism relays information that has an impact on the daily lives of readers and reports on the political and social situation,” it claimed.

“It strengthens the reader’s connection to a community, emphasizing their role as a citizen in a democracy,” the report continued. “With the ever-increasing influx of digital information, local journalism is of paramount importance in the life of a community.”

While the report failed to explain exactly what “social cohesion” means, media funded by the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has become infamous for propping up the Liberals while tearing down any opposition to the party or its radical agendas.

In fact, in September, House leader Karina Gould directed mainstream media reporters to “scrutinize” Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has repeatedly condemned government-funded media as being an arm of the Liberals.

Indeed, there have been multiple instances of the CBC pushing what appears to be ideological content, including the creation of pro-LGBT material for kids, tacitly endorsing the gender mutilation of children, promoting euthanasia, and even seeming to justify the burning of mostly Catholic churches throughout the country.

Despite this, beginning in 2019, Parliament changed the Income Tax Act to give yearly rebates of 25 percent for each news employee in cabinet-approved media outlets earning up to $55,000 a year to a maximum of $13,750.

The Canadian Heritage Department since admitted that the payouts are not even sufficient to keep legacy media outlets running and recommended that the rebates be doubled to a maximum of $29,750 annually.

Last November, Trudeau again announced increased payouts for legacy media outlets that coincide with the leadup to the 2025 election. The subsidies are expected to cost taxpayers $129 million over the next five years.

Similarly, Trudeau’s 2024 budget outlined $42 million in increased funding for the CBC in 2024-25.

The $42 million to the CBC is in addition to massive media payouts that already make up roughly 70 percent of its operating budget and total more than $1 billion annually.

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Aristotle Foundation

Canada’s immigration system and Islamist terror threats

Published on October 7, 2024

By

From the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy

By Collin May

Arrests linked to terrorism reveal concerns over both imported and homegrown radicalization

Recently, Canada’s immigration system has come under scrutiny due to a series of arrests of individuals alleged to be planning terrorist attacks. The first arrests came in July when a father and son, Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi and Mostafa Eldidi, were charged with a number of terrorism-related offenses after their arrest near Toronto. The pair immigrated to Canada, where the father obtained his citizenship, prompting a review of immigration screening processes.

This was followed earlier this month by the arrest of Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, who was alleged to be planning a mass shooting at a Jewish center in New York City. Kahn, a Pakistani citizen, was in Canada on a student visa. He was arrested in Quebec on his way to New York.

While these two cases playing out in eastern Canada have drawn the most media attention, we need to look to western Canada, specifically to the province of Alberta, to find several examples of homegrown Canadian terrorism. Earlier this month, Zakarya Rida Hussein, a Canadian citizen living in Calgary, Alberta, was sentenced to six years in prison on terrorism-related charges, including plans to bomb Calgary’s Pride Parade in 2023.

Even more problematic for Canada’s international reputation were two Alberta residents exporting Islamist terrorism to the United Kingdom and Israel. In July of this year, a London jury found Anjem Choudary, the notorious leader of the radical Al-Muhajiroun group, guilty of directing a terrorist group. However, Choudary was not alone in the dock. Khaled Hussein, originally from Edmonton, Alberta, was also convicted of holding membership in the same banned terror organization.

Similarly, in Israel, radicalized Alberta teacher Zachareah Adam Quraishi was killed earlier this summer when he attempted to attack an Israeli security post at Netiv Ha’asara. Quraishi was educated at the University of Alberta.

These incidents suggest a growing problem as it relates to both the importation of terrorists into Canada and the radicalization of Canadian Muslim citizens with the added concern that Canada is now exporting Islamist terror to our allies in the US, Europe, and Israel. This raises the question of what Canadian governments, at the national and provincial level, are doing to counter the importation and domestic growth of terror.

Immigration is primarily a federal responsibility, and opposition Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman has been attempting to hold the Canadian government’s feet to the fire. Over the past few months, Lantsman has been demanding answers as to how the father-son duo was able to immigrate to Canada, and why a student visa was issued to Khan, allowing him to use Canada as a staging ground for attacks in New York.

In terms of the domestic radicalization of Canadian citizens in the province of Alberta, there has been little discussion regarding how this is occurring or what the federal and provincial governments are doing to stem the tide. In Canada, for instance, education is a provincial responsibility, but nothing has been said by the conservative Alberta government about the proliferation of Islamist ideologies in the province or if anything is being done through the education system to counter their impact.

This silence is coming at a time when Canada’s federally-appointed special representative on combating Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, recently sent a letter to college and university administrators in Canada recommending the hiring of more Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian professors. Far from expressing concern over the growing Islamist terror threats emanating from Canada, Elghawaby highlighted an alleged dangerous climate on Canadian campuses for pro-Palestinian protesters.

The province of Quebec, no friend of Elghawaby, called for the federal Islamophobia representative to resign, citing her interference with Quebec’s provincial jurisdiction and its stance that academic hiring in the province should be based on principles of secularism rather than religious affiliation. No such call has come from the Alberta government.

That the Alberta government has had nothing to say on these matters should not surprise Canadians given that Alberta’s minister responsible for advanced education, Rajan Sawhney, was the only member of the Alberta provincial government to publicly call for my own resignation as chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission in 2022.

My crime, in Sawhney’s eyes, was having written an academic review of a book on historic Islamic imperialism penned by renowned British-Israeli historian Efraim Karsh and published by Yale University Press in 2006. Ms. Sawhney’s initial statement condemning my review has since been removed from her Facebook page.

To date, there is little evidence that most Canadian governments, federally or provincially, are overly concerned about Canada’s new reputation, and especially that of Alberta, as exporters of Islamist terrorism. However, as governments grapple with the potential negative blow-back from our allies, this attitude may undergo a rather abrupt change.

Collin May is a lawyer in Calgary, a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, an adjunct lecturer in community health sciences at the University of Calgary, a former chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and the author of numerous articles on the psychology, philosophy, and social theory of cancel culture.

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