September 30th will be National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. This year it should be a day of celebration. Parliament declared September 30 a holiday soon after the nation was convulsed by the shocking claim that 215 residential students had been somehow...
On May 31, 2021, I was a substitute teacher at an Abbotsford high school named after the painter Robert Bateman when news was feverishly spreading about the “discovery” of the “remains” of 215 children in a “mass grave” at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops...
I regularly drive by an elementary school. Like many Canadian schools its fence is festooned with 215 orange plastic ribbons, signifying the 215 Kamloops residential school students who are alleged to have met their death by foul means, and were then secretly buried...
It is easy to separate the facts from the myths about “genocide” allegations at Indigenous residential schools. Just read the TRC report
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
The RCMP has a long and honourable history, and has served Canadians well. RCMP top brass and regular officers have always insisted on doing their job in their own way. They have robustly specifically resisted all attempts by politicians to interfere in their clear...
Where does this toxic ideology of wanting to re-write history to atone for the sins of the past come from? Does anything truly matter when the narrative is more important than truth? Gerry Bowler and host David Leis discuss the value of a collective history and the great dangers in ignoring, erasing and revising history the way revolutionary movements desire to do, noting the ways this is prevalent in Canada today.
An early 20th century photo of the cemetery associated with the St. Mary’s IRS, Kenora, Ontario, showing wooden grave markers of students that were allowed to disintegrate over time, proving that students were given a proper Christian (Catholic) burial. "We...
Two years ago Canadians bought into what was probably the biggest conspiracy theory ever promulgated in this country. Members of the Kamloops indigenous community made the astounding claim that 215 graves, containing the remains of students of the former Kamloops...
In a Globe and Mail article on 5 May 2023 the National Centre For Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) finally publicly admitted that its Memorial Register is not a list of thousands of missing children buried in unmarked graves. It turns out the entire claim of thousands...
Michelle Cyca’s article in The Walrus about residential school denialism of May 4, 2023, gets one thing right. She mentions tuberculosis. Once. Like many who write about those who suffered at residential schools, Cyca seems oblivious to the context of the times – in...
Winnipeg City Hall recently proclaimed that Bishop Grandin Boulevard, Bishop Grandin Trail, and Grandin Street will be renamed, respectively, Abinojii Mikanah (Ojibway for 'A Children's Way'), Awisasak Meskanow (Cree for 'A Children's Way'), and Taapeewin Way (Michif...
Yes. But there was nothing sinister or evil about any of the deaths. They were simply a fact of life at a time when death from disease was a sad, but common occurrence. Children who attended day schools, or no school at all, died in even greater numbers on their home...
Only when the truth is known can an honourable reconciliation be forged On Jan. 31, Dr. Michael Mahon, president of the University of Lethbridge, cancelled a talk that Dr. Frances Widdowson was scheduled to present. Like all scholars, Dr. Widdowson has nuanced views...