Combating Hate by Promoting Hate

State sponsored racism and censorship are as busy as ever up here in Canada where “Liberal” racism makes for nice fat government grants

New Canadian legislation is apparently up for debate in our federal House of Commons. As usual only out-of-the-way internet hobbyists like myself ever hear of such things up here in Canada because our media is tightly controlled by means of a combination of bribery, that is “federal funding”, and subtle coercion whereby every journalist knows what not to risk his job to report. This new legislation is called the “Combating Hate Act”, Bill C-9.

Our Canadian Constitution contains the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guarantees that all Canadians have the right to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Thought. But in 2022 when the unarmed and peaceful Truckers Freedom Convoy protested peacefully and lawfully in Ottawa our Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau evoked the “Emergencies Act”, a declaration of martial law and set in motion the persecution of the truckers and their families that has not stopped even today. People’s bank accounts were frozen. I read of one expert in international financial regulations who mentioned that only Canada has the “legal mechanism” whereby the EU or US could “legally” steal the frozen assets of Russia or Iran.

Let that suffice. Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Thought up here was swept aside with ease when Justin Trudeau – and any PM has the same clout – found it inconvenient. That was the year, 2022, when I lost trust in my country. In the event, Trudeau was persuaded that fiddling with the right of people to have a sovereign bank account is catastrophic for national and international business – simply put, theft cannot be declared to be legal without destroying the law and destroying trust in any and every contract.

So the “Emergencies Act” – a law that was intended to deal with an armed invasion or an armed insurrection, like a real civil war – was soon withdrawn. But public trust in the government and law is like trust in marriage, break it by adultery or by even one slap to the face, and it’s gone for good.

The same thing goes for declaring that opinions are illegal. The law is one law for all or it’s not law at all, never mind how you call it. One law for me and another for thee is oppression. It’s power, not law. You don’t like my opinions and, lucky you, you have the political status today to jail me if I dare to disagree. But someday power can leak out of your little battery and your opinions might be made illegal.

I used to think that that Freedom of Speech was the bedrock of liberty up here. I was wrong. I used to think that factual truth was bedrock up here. That’s the problem when you replace liberty with power, political power starts destroying the ability to say what’s true and legislating lies as truth.

A Committee of recently appointed Canadian Senators tried to introduce a clause into the currently proposed Bill C-9 “Combating Hate Act” which would send Canadians to prison for up to two years for having opinions these Senators do not like.

Watch how Senators voted to jail Canadians for “denialism” - YouTube

The amendment was voted down by the Canadian Senate caucus and this is one strong indication that if this amendment had succeeded in being included in the Bill before the Canadian House of Commons it would have been voted down by the Commons.

But the bare fact that any Senators could even propose such an amendment to a bill, Bill C-9, whose title, the “Combating Hate Act” already alarms me, is outrageous from the standpoint of anybody who cares to preserve freedom of speech in Canada. When I read the content of this proposed amendment I was even more shocked:

Proposed by Senator Nancy Keratak-Lindell, the amendment reads follows:

“Everyone who by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying or downplaying the Indian residential school system.

(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”

The committee consisted of a handful of Senators including Madam Senator Keratin-Lindell all of whom praised it with only one exception. One of the committee abstained from voting for it but not because she objected to it, only because she said it was not harsh enough.

What is a summary conviction under Canadian law, I wondered. Google’s AI “summary” says:

<< A summary conviction in Canada refers to the prosecution and punishment of the least serious category of criminal offences. These minor crimes are strictly handled in provincial courts without a jury, and carry significantly lighter penalties than more serious “indictable” offences… The standard maximum penalty is a $5,000 fine, imprisonment for two years less a day, or both. However, some specific summary offences cap maximum jail time at 6 to 12 months. >>

I see. So a “summary” conviction can still send you to prison for two years. The only difference with a summary conviction is that you don’t get a trial with a jury. You are a prisoner of a provincial court and that means a judge who is appointed by politicians who don’t like your opinions and don’t like you having Freedom of Speech. Like the BC and Alberta provincial courts who threw people into prison without trail because they mouthed off against the COVID “ mandates”.

Sorry, so sorry. I get angry. Don’t worry folks, I’m pushing 80 real hard so my big mouth won’t be a problem for that much longer.

I heard this phrase, “Residential School Denialism” and naturally I consulted the talking encyclopedia.

“What is residential school denialism”, I asked.

AI Summary:

<< Residential school denialism is the rejection, twisting, or misrepresentation of basic facts about the Canadian Indian residential school system. Instead of outright denying the system existed, denialists minimize the abuse, question survivor testimonies, and frame the schools as progressive “civilizing missions,” undermining truth and reconciliation efforts.

<< Scholars and human rights advocates identify several key tactics and motivations behind this phenomenon:

<< Common Denialist Tactics

<< • Minimizing Abuse: Claiming that severe physical, sexual, and psychological abuse was rare or that only a few isolated incidents occurred, despite mountains of archival evidence and testimonies.

<< • Rebranding History: Arguing that the schools were well-intentioned, benevolent “civilizing” or “educational” interventions rather than tools of cultural genocide and assimilation.

<< • Sowing Doubt on Deaths: Attempting to discredit archaeological investigations (such as ground-penetrating radar) that confirm unmarked graves, claiming that the number of deaths has been inflated by the “reconciliation industry”.

<< • Weaponizing Individual Exceptions: Highlighting rare instances where a survivor credited their school for teaching them specific skills, using these isolated experiences to invalidate the widespread, generational trauma of the system.

<< Why It Matters

<< Denialism is a significant threat to meaningful reconciliation. Experts warn that it acts as a form of political misinformation, similar to climate change denial, designed to protect the colonial status quo and absolve churches and the state of responsibility. For survivors, listening to denialists question their lived experiences causes profound retraumatization.

<< The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation provides historical records and survivor accounts that counter these revisionist narratives. To learn more about identifying and confronting this ideology, you can explore the Downie & Wenjack Fund educational resources on residential schools. >>

I’m going to hit you on the possible blindside with an opinion. Get ready, it’s a doozy:

Everything that Google’s “AI” states as fact is actually opinion and it is riddled through and through with lies.

When ‘experts warn’ about anything that’s their opinion. “The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation” provides “records” which counter “narratives”? That means this “Centre” is a political organization which is selling an opinion.

Here’s my opinion: telling lies and calling them truth is going to absolutely prevent any reconciliation of differences. Truth is not opinion, truth is fact. Period.

There was not one single body discovered in that alleged burial ground in Kamloops. That’s a fact. The controversy and heated accusations serve to make racial tension speak louder than facts.

Here’s my opinion about that: people who are pushing lies are not only not contributing to reconciliation, they are deliberately preventing reconciliation. Because if there were reconciliation between aboriginal Canadians and the non-aboriginal communities that would be the end of government grants to “advocates”.

Professor Jacques Rouillard set out the facts in this article for The Dorchester Review in 2022. I have edited it for brevity but anybody can download all of it and the notes. Please do. Truth is what “matters”.

In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found – The Dorchester Review

https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/in-kamloops-not-one-body-has-been-found

“With the Kamloops Reserve cemetery close by, is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely — on the reserve itself — without any reaction from the band council until last summer?” – Professor Rouillard

No it’s not credible. It is not possible to believe that such mass murder was carried on for decades on aboriginal reserves with nobody complaining. To believe that is to believe that Catholic and other churches established residential schools for the purpose of waging genocide, killing children to wipe out aboriginal peoples. That is exactly what the “advocates” who talk about “Cultural Genocide” and “Residential School Denialism” are accusing Canadians of doing. Wash off the euphemisms and that’s what they are saying.

These people are accusing Canada and Canadians of racism when in truth these “advocates” are drumming up race hate for their own benefit, for money and power.

In the hysteria, the well funded and internationally promoted hysteria, over 65 churches almost all on reserve land, were burned down by anonymous “activists” (so-called by Trudeau) without one single perpetrator being arrested by the RCMP. This well organized crime spree was called “understandable” by PM Justin Trudeau. That was the real crime. Trudeau and the then heads of the RCMP should be investigated and charged for State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism. That would go a long way toward ‘reconciliation’ as far as I’m concerned.

IN KAMLOOPS NOT ONE BODY HAS BEEN FOUND

January 11, 2022

By Professor Jacques Rouillard

Special to THE DORCHESTER REVIEW. Jacques Rouillard is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal.

AFTER SEVEN MONTHS of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?

The Canadian Press has just honoured the children of residential schools as the “Person of the Year 2021.” The huge media story last summer grew out of the scanning of part of the site in the British Columbia interior where the school operated from 1890 to 1978. The “discovery” was first reported last May 27 by Tk’emlúps te secwépemc First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir after an anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, used ground-penetrating radar in a search for the remains of children alleged by some to be buried there. She is a young anthropologist, an instructor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of the Fraser Valley since 2018. Her preliminary report is actually based on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains. According to Chief Casimir, these “missing children” represent “undocumented deaths.” Their presence, she says, has long been “knowledge” in the community and “some were as young as three years old.”[1]

From new research revealed at a July 15 press conference last year, the anthropologist scaled back the potential discovery from 215 to 200 “probable burials.” Having “barely scratched the surface,” she found many “disturbances in the ground such as tree roots, metal and stones.” The “disruptions picked up in the radar,” she says, led her to conclude that the sites “have multiple signatures that present like burials.” But she cannot confirm that until the site is excavated – if it is ever done. A community spokesperson says the full report “cannot” be released to the media.[2] For Chief Casimir, “it is not yet clear whether the continuing work on the Kamloops site will involve excavation.”

The Kamloops “discovery” of 2021 created a major sensation in Canada and abroad. Based on the preliminary assessment and before any remains were found or any credible report made, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately referred to “a dark and shameful chapter” in Canadian history.[3] British Columbia Premier John Horgan said he was “horrified and heartbroken” to learn of a burial site with 215 children that highlights the violence and consequences of the residential school system.[4] Several other Aboriginal communities and media outlets then followed up with references to unmarked graves.

On May 30, the federal government lowered the flags on all its buildings to half-staff. Later, it instituted a new holiday to honour “missing” children and survivors of residential schools. Spontaneously, clusters of shoes and orange shirts and other paraphernalia were placed on church steps in many cities or on the steps of legislatures in memory of the little victims. Around the country, churches were burned or vandalized. Statues were spray-painted and pulled down in apparent retaliation for the fate of the children. The statue of Queen Victoria in front of the Manitoba Legislature was defaced and pulled down. Montreal’s statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was knocked down, his detached bronze head symbolically rolling on the ground.

In the wake of unsubstantiated claims by Aboriginal leaders, several media outlets amplified and hyped the story by alleging that the bodies of 215 children had been found, adding that “thousands” of children had “gone missing” from residential schools and that parents had not been informed. The undisturbed sites even became “mass graves” where bodies were dumped in a jumble.

This supposed “news” made the rounds in all sorts of media, tarnishing Canada’s self-image and reputation abroad. Under the title “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada,” the May 28 New York Times, even when updated on Oct. 5, reported that “For decades, most [sic] Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number [sic] never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.” The indigenous community “has found evidence of what happened to some of its missing children: a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school.”[5]

False Reports

THESE FALSE REPORTS induced the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to portray the situation as “a large scale human rights violation.” The UN urged Canadian authorities and the Catholic Church to conduct “thorough investigations into the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of over 200 children” — again before a single verified body had been exhumed.[6] Amnesty International is demanding that the persons and institutions responsible for the “remains” that had been “found” in Kamloops be prosecuted.[7] …

The supposed perpetrators of this “crime” are also making excuses: governments, religious communities, the Conference of Catholic Bishops. In June Pope Francis expressed his pain for “the shocking discovery in Canada of the remains of 215 children” at Kamloops,[9] and in an exceptional gesture promised to come to Canada. Aboriginal leaders are demanding a formal apology and some (including Rosanne Casimir) that the church provide more compensation for survivors.[10] To find out the truth about unmarked graves, the Canadian government made available in June an envelope of $27 million to “to identify and delineate burial sites, and returning remains home if desired.”[11]

By never pointing out that it is only a matter of speculation or potentiality, and that no remains have yet been found, governments and the media are simply granting credence to what is really a thesis: the thesis of the “disappearance” of children from residential schools. From an allegation of “cultural genocide” endorsed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) we have moved to “physical genocide,” a conclusion that the Commission explicitly rejects in its report.[12] And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference…

A project to test the soil with the same method at the Brandon Residential School in Manitoba, which began in 2012 and was re-launched in 2019, has not yet yielded any conclusive results. In June, the research team works to identify 104 potential graves and still needs to consult the residential school’s archives and interview survivors.[14]

In its 2015 report, the TRC identified 3,200 deaths of children at residential schools. Surprisingly, it was unable to record the names of one-third of the children (32%) or for half (49%), the cause of death.[15] Why are there so many “nameless” residential school students? According to Vol. 4 of the Report, there are “significant limitations in both the quality and quantity of the data the Commission has been able to compile on residential school deaths.”[16]…

Kamloops Residential School Deaths

THE COMMISSION expressed the hope that further investigation would occur into the reports of deaths in industrial schools, and Rosanne Casimir said that it is “of critical importance to identify those lost children” in Kamloops.[20] I am happy to announce here in THE DORCHESTER REVIEW that we have completed a follow-up study.

Founded in 1890 on the initiative of Shuswap Chief Louis Clexlixqen (pictured below), the Kamloops industrial school was run by successive generations of priests and brothers of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and by the Sisters of St. Anne from Quebec. In the 1950s, with approximately 500 children, the school was run by four English-speaking Oblates and 11 sisters of Saint Anne, according to the estimate by Mathieu Perreault in La Presse (Jul. 2, 2021). He believed that a typical residential school run by the Catholic Church had two or three Oblates, a dozen nuns, and often hundreds of children.[21]

At the Kamloops residential school, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) officially recorded the names of 51 children who died from 1915 to 1964.[22] We have been able to find information on these children from the records in Library and Archives Canada and from death certificates held by the British Columbia Archives’ Genealogy resource online which, it seems, was not consulted by NCTR researchers.[23]

Combining these two sources provides a good picture of the deaths of at least 35 of the 49 students (two are duplicates).[24] Seventeen died in hospital and eight on their own reserves as a result of illness or accidents. Four were the subject of autopsies and seven of coroners’ inquests. As for burial sites, 24 are buried in their home Indian Reserve cemetery, and four at the Kamloops Indian Reserve cemetery. For the rest of the 49 children, information is either missing or requires that the complete death certificate in the B.C. Vital Statistics Agency be consulted. This is a far cry from the unverified claim that authorities overlooked or somehow covered up their deaths, or that the parents were not informed, or the remains never returned home. Most were informed and most were returned home.

Beginning in 1935, the Department of Indian Affairs imposed a specific procedure for handling the death of a student. The principal of the residential school had to inform the departmental agent, who formed an inquiry committee composed of himself, the principal, and the doctor who had diagnosed the death. Parents must be informed of the investigation and were allowed to attend and make a statement.[25]…

SIGNIFICANTLY, THE Kamloops residential school is located at the heart of the Kamloops Reserve itself — a fact that is never reported by Aboriginal spokespersons or the media. The TRC report states that “schools were virtually all church-run in the early years of the system [and] Christian burial was the norm at most schools.” Also, the adjoining church cemetery “may be used as a burial ground for students who die at the school as well as for members of the local community and the missionaries themselves.”[27] This is what happened in Kamloops. Our research shows that four students are buried in the Band cemetery on the reserve that is located near St. Joseph’s Church, not far from the residential school.

With the cemetery so close by, is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, without any reaction from the band council until last summer? Chief Casimir states that the presence of children’s remains had been “known” in the community for a long time. Aboriginal families are certainly as concerned about the fate of their children as any other community; why did they say nothing? Moreover, how can one think that entire groups of religious men and women dedicated to high moral standards could conspire to commit such sordid crimes without dissent and not even a single whistleblower? …

Let us conclude with a side-note on another “nameless burial” site near a residential school, that of the Cowessess (Marieval) First Nation in Saskatchewan, which created more shock waves last June after the announcement in Kamloops. Operating since 1899 in a remote area, it was run by the Oblates and the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Hyacinthe. The surface search by georadar is more advanced there as 751 well laid out graves have been discovered. As shown by a CBC News reporter, this is in fact simply the Catholic cemetery of the Mission of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Marieval.

According to the register of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1885 to 1933, there are certainly graves present on site of children who died at the residential school, but also those of many adults and children under five years of age from the surrounding area. “There was a mixture of everyone in that graveyard, in that cemetery,” said local resident Pearl Lerat and her sister, Linda Whiteman, who attended Marieval residential school from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Pearl said “the sisters’ parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there along with others from outside the First Nation,” whites and natives together. According to other residents living nearby, the graves had crosses and headstones until the 1960s when a priest allegedly removed them because the cemetery was in “terrible shape.”[28]

According to historian Jim Miller of the University of Saskatchewan, “the remains of children discovered in Marieval and Kamloops had been buried in cemeteries according to Catholic rites, under wooden crosses that quickly crumbled.” “The wooden cross was a Catholic burial marker for the poor,” confirms Brian Gettler of the University of Toronto.[29] The residential school cemeteries with their wooden crosses probably look like the present St. Joseph’s Native Cemetery on the Kamloops Reserve (see photo).

According to the TRC report, the churchyard often served as a place of worship and burial for students who died at school as well as for members of the local community and the missionaries themselves. As residential school cemeteries have been abandoned, neglected, and even forgotten after their closure, they have blurred into the background. In many cases, they became difficult to locate or were used for other purposes.[30] The Commission rightly proposed that they be documented, maintained, and protected.

It is hard to believe that a preliminary search for an alleged cemetery or mass grave in an apple orchard on reserve land near the residential school of Kamloops could have led to such a spiral of claims endorsed by the Canadian government and repeated by mass media all over the world. It gives a terrible and simplistic impression of complex issues in Canadian history. The exhumations have not yet begun and no remains have obviously been found. Imaginary stories and emotion have outweighed the pursuit of truth. On the road to reconciliation, isn’t the best way to seek and tell the whole truth rather than deliberately create sensational myths?