Five years after Kamloops, the physical evidence has not caught up to the political story. In May 2021 the country was told that ground-penetrating radar had found 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Flags came down. Churches burned. Ottawa unleashed billions in spending. The word ‘genocide’ moved from activist language into official talking points.
What did not arrive, then or since, is a confirmed human burial tied to that announcement. No grave has been excavated and shown to the public. Similar radar stories at other sites have followed the same path: a press conference, a moral panic, and then years of not digging – or, digging and not finding what was promised.
That gap is what True North put on paper when almost nobody in legacy media would. Grave Error and Dead Wrong, edited by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, became Amazon bestsellers because they did the unfashionable thing: they separated the real history of the schools, including real deaths, real abuse and real grief, from the unverified claim that secret burial grounds had just been discovered under an apple orchard. Asking for bones, records and excavations is not a denial that children suffered. It is how a country is supposed to treat a charge that remade its politics.
NDP MP Leah Gazan has spent the last week trying to make that question a crime. She is pressing the Carney government to adopt her private member’s bill, which would treat condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the residential school system, or “misrepresenting” related facts, as the wilful promotion of hatred. She has said this is not about freedom of speech. It is about incitement of hate, and Ottawa already has the power to criminalize it. The Senate already tried to bolt a similar offence onto the Combatting Hate Act and failed. Gazan is back at it now, with Orange Shirt Day as the backdrop and Rebel News shirts reading “Dig Deeper” and “Still No Proof” as the exhibit. Those slogans are a demand for evidence. In Gazan’s eyes, they are close enough to hate that the Criminal Code should get involved.
Watch what the word “denialism” is being asked to cover. It is no longer limited to someone who claims no child ever died in a residential school. It is being stretched over journalists, authors and ordinary people who say the 2021 grave claims were oversold. If “downplaying” and “misrepresenting facts” become police matters, the people who decide what the official facts are will also decide who goes to court. That is a remarkable power to hand a government that has already spent billions on a story it has not been able to verify on the ground.
Legacy outlets have spent five years amplifying the original claim and starving the follow-up. Corrections, when they come at all, arrive quietly. Dissenting researchers are treated as moral contaminants. True North published the books the rest of the industry would not touch, and that is why this moment matters. If Gazan gets her way, the next edition of that argument does not happen in a review or on a podcast. It happens with a Crown attorney in a courtroom.
Residential schools were a real system with a real human cost. Survivors do not need a speech law to have their experiences taken seriously. What they, and everyone else, need is a country that can tell the difference between documented history and a radar survey that was sold as a graveyard. Criminalizing the second conversation will not produce a single confirmed burial. It will only teach Canadians that some government stories are too sacred to check.
If you want the record that the official narrative still will not print, read Grave Error and Dead Wrong. Both are on Amazon. Buy them, share them, and keep the argument in the open while that is still legal.
