The discovery of underground anomalies at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021 offers a cautionary tale about how an assumed consensus, even one based on half-truths or misrepresentations, can lead to a climate of censorship.
On May 27, 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation shocked the world when it issued a press release claiming that the use of ground-penetrating radar had led to the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The following day, the New York Times reported that a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school had been discovered.
Two months later, Sarah Beaulieu, the researcher who performed the survey, clarified that with ground-penetrating radar they could never say definitively that they are human remains until excavation, which is why they needed to pull back and say they are probable burials. But it was too late. In the weeks that followed the Kamloops announcement, a succession of other First Nations reported similar discoveries. Many of them were more careful to note that they had not found mass graves. Some were known gravesites where the wooden markings had degraded over time.
Nevertheless, the media and federal government continued to push the narrative that hundreds of bodies of dead Indigenous children had been found on the sites of former residential schools. The fallout was swift. Flags flew at half-mast. Canada Day celebrations were called off. And anyone who tried to have a reasoned conversation about residential schools was cancelled.
In December 2021, Frances Widdowson, a political science professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, was fired, at least in part, for daring to suggest that residential schools had some educational benefits. A high school teacher in Abbotsford, B.C., also landed in hot water that year for pointing out in class that most of the deaths at residential schools occurred due to disease, not abuse. It did not matter that his statement was true. He was let go two years later.
The facts about the graves story were brought to light, most thoroughly by National Post's Terry Glavin a year after the story first broke, but the truth only seemed to add fuel to the censorship fire. In February 2024, NDP MP Leah Gazan called on Parliament to criminalize what was being termed residential school denialism. A few months later, Kimberly Murray, the Trudeau government's special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools, released her interim report calling for legal remedies to combat denialism. Gazan and Murray's calls were both met with openness by Liberal cabinet ministers.
