Kimberly Murray has just released a second interim report that needs to be understood for what it is.
Murray is an Indigenous woman who served as the Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. In 2022 Trudeau appointed her to the newly created position of “Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools” (IRS). Murray’s two-year appointment came with a salary of between $250,000 and $290,000. She has recently obtained an extension of 6 months to her mandate.
The announced intention was that the Special Interlocutor would provide an objective report into children alleged to be missing from IRS.
She published an interim report in 2023. She expressly repudiated any pretence of presenting an “objective” report. She redefined her role as one of advocacy on behalf of Indians.
There can be no doubt that Murray is zealously pursuing that role. In her interim report, she argued that “denialism” should be made a hate crime. She also proclaimed that all available records from churches, schools, governments or wherever should be declared “Indigenous Sovereign Data.” Such records would then be under the sole control of Indians. Access could be denied to anyone who sought to use actual historical records as a basis to challenge the false narratives published by the Indian Industry.
The Minister of Justice immediately announced he was favourably disposed to her recommendations. So too, did his successor. Both stated they were waiting for her final report before taking action. That report has not yet been delivered.
In March 2024, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tabled Bill 63, The Online Harms Act. In part, the bill deals with online evils such as children being blackmailed for sexual actions.
However, the bill also deals with a completely unrelated matter which is not at all confined to something that would be online. The bill proposes that hate speech be made a criminal offence. Hate speech is defined to include any speech that would cause any given group, which would include Indians, to be detested or vilified.
It becomes a criminal offence if anyone says anything that meets this test. The speaker has no right to claim his or her speech is truthful. Truth is not a defence.
Over and above creating a new criminal offence, the bill also makes hate speech a human rights offence. Anonymous complaints can be made to the Human Rights Tribunal, which can then charge anyone with a human rights violation and levy fines of up to $50,000. It can also assess costs against a perpetrator of hate speech. (Win or lose, no costs or consequences are ever imposed on persons who file false complaints.)
Again, truth is not a defence. The test before the tribunal is a balance of probabilities.
I believe Murray’s interim report must have been very influential with Trudeau. It is hard to conceive of how he could have concocted this anti-free speech bill without referencing her report.
He and others in cabinet such as Marc Miller have often spoken of the evil of “denialism”. This bill is their plan to eliminate that “evil”.
A more correct way of describing their objective would be to say they plan to eliminate anyone from correcting any false narrative published by the Indian Industry, such as the now infamous claim in May 2021 by the Kamloops Indian Band that a ground radar survey had discovered 215 bodies of missing (and presumed murdered) children. That spurious claim has been debunked. Trudeau and Company want to ensure that no one else will dare challenge a false narrative. They want Murray’s interpretation of history to be unchangeable.
If this bill becomes law, the authors of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us could find themselves the victims of a human rights complaint. Again, truth is not a defence.
On July 4, Murray released another interim report. Much of this report is intended to bring a wide range of institutions and persons into detestation and vilification. This would include Canada as a whole, all residential schools, most religious orders, all the non-Indigenous staff that administered the schools and many named government officials in charge of policy.
Murray’s report would easily meet the definition of hate speech. However, none of the victims fall within the protected categories that can make a complaint. So, Murray publishes hate speech with complete impunity. But those who criticize her do not have that protection. If Bill 63 is enacted, she mig t complain that this essay constitutes hate speech.
Murray entitles her second interim report, Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience: Unmarked Burials and Mass Graves of Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children in Canada.
She starts with a quote from a UN official:
“The temptation to rewrite history for political purposes is irresistible for governments in some countries…. The writing of history has always been a battlefield, but only archives can ensure that the historical debate can take place on an informed basis.”
Murray does not see the irony in this. She wants to have all archives closed to everyone except people of whom she approves. She wants her view of history to be imposed on Canada, with no independent researchers being able to challenge it with facts from the archives. And she claims everyone who disagrees with her is rewriting history.
She then goes on to claim: (italics are my emphasis)
“The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada provides indisputable historical evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass human rights violations in the Indian Residential Schools System.”
She claims that the “supposedly benevolent goal of assimilating Indigenous Peoples…masked a more sinister reality.”
Her “sinister reality” is that the TRC report provided “indisputable evidence of genocide”.
This is of course, entirely untrue. It has not been proven that a single child was ever murdered or ever went missing.
Every time the Indian Industry posts a list of missing and presumably murdered children, Nina Green finds the death certificates, reporting the cause of death and the location of the burial. Indeed, in testifying before a parliamentary committee earlier this year, Murray admitted, “The children are not missing. Their bodies are in the cemeteries.”
In her introduction, Murray admits to one of her objectives (which is not included in her mandate): “Understanding the scope and scale of State wrongdoing and harms makes clear that there is an ongoing need for reparations…”
Ah.
Reparations are her goal on behalf of her clients. She does not mention the fulsome compensation already paid to every Indigenous person who ever attended a residential school (without proof of any actual harm) pursuant to the settlement agreement of multiple class actions reached in 2006. And she purports to claim reparations generally, even though she was expressly mandated to deal only with residential schools.
She claims that government strategy, including IRS, was intended “to eliminate Indigenous Peoples as distinct Peoples and to remove them from their lands.”
She does not define what “their lands” means. She cannot be referring to their reserves because no government, neither federal nor provincial, ever proposed removing Indians from any reserve. Sir John A Macdonald insisted that reserves were sacrosanct (unlike in the USA, where Indians were often forcibly removed from their reservations.) So, she must have meant the entirety of Canada, ignoring that most of Canada (not BC) was voluntarily ceded by Indian bands in various treaties.
Although her mandate was specifically limited to residential schools, Murray feels free to pontificate on unrelated government policies, such as child welfare policies where provincial governments rescued Indigenous children from abuse. Several actions taken by government to benefit the Indigenous people are reinterpreted by Murray as springing from a malevolent intent.
She denounces “settler colonialism.” She decries the rate of deaths at IRS without admitting that the rate of deaths (caused by diseases which were not eliminated until vaccines were widespread by about 1950) was much higher on reserves than at the schools.
She concludes her introduction with this:
“Reframing this history through an anti-historical lens of international law and legal principles reveals how systemic settler colonial patterns of genocide and a culture of impunity shaped the laws, policies, and everyday practices of government, church and various other institutional officials.”
One can hope this interim report will be wholly ignored. However, given the welcome Trudeau and Co gave to her interim report last year, followed by his proposed legislation regarding “hate speech,” it is doubtful Trudeau will ignore it. I expect him to virtue-signal about it, his specialty.
It is not difficult to predict what Murray will include in her final report. It will repeat all of the above and contain more denunciations.
The rest of us should recognize this report for what it is –an unhinged attack on Canada and Canadians.
Lawyer Barry Kirkham is a King’s Counsel and a leading member of the bar in British Columbia. An earlier version of this essay was published in The Western Standard.
