The Senate human rights committee's vote this week to criminalize the phantasm of 'residential schools denialism' through a last-minute amendment to a Liberal hate speech bill can be understood as an absurdly unserious pantomime. It represents a fusion of the denialism canard with Liberal efforts to intrude on constitutionally protected free speech rights.
To navigate this issue, one must notice that it is the latest effort to bully Canadians into accepting their status as citizens of a racist, genocidal settler state. The first giveaway about 'residential schools denialism' is that its content is always occluded by dogmatic edicts governing how the legacy of residential schools is taught. At its core is the proposition that 'denialists' exist, hiding rational skepticism to undermine reconciliation. This is a conspiracy theory.
The justification for criminalizing such denialism is to defend survivors against violence and hatred. However, the real point is to shield the Trudeau Liberals and a rogues' gallery of academics, bureaucrats, journalists, and First Nations leaders from scrutiny for their roles in the national mass hysteria incited five years ago.
The bedlam began when Justin Trudeau lowered flags following a false report of a mass grave of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. This was followed by several false accounts of children buried at residential school sites across Canada. Statues were toppled, Canada Day was cancelled, and dozens of Catholic churches were vandalized and burned. By Remembrance Day 2021, the RCMP reported a 260 per cent spike in anti-Catholic hate crimes.
Reports of children murdered and secretly buried became routine, appearing even in final reports by Kimberly Murray, the Liberals' Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children. To publicly question such stories risked being vilified as equivalent to a Holocaust denier.
