How Can Ottawa Criminalize Residential School ‘Denialism’ If No One Can Even Define It?

Canada’s social panic over claimed unmarked graves enters an unsettling new phase.

Justin Trudeau in Kamloops, BC on May 23rd, 2022, greeting Tk'emlups te Secwepemc community members at an event marking the first anniversary of the discovery of possible unmarked Indigenous child graves.

On Tuesday, I published a Quillette piece updating readers about the odd (and getting odder) afterlife of the national Canadian social panic that erupted in 2021, following claims that 215 Indigenous child graves had been found on the grounds of an old residential school in the western province of British Columbia.

Many of these residential schools—to which Indigenous children were once shipped so they could be “civilized” and stripped of their culture—were nasty places. Untold numbers of Indigenous children endured abuse. And several thousand are known to have died (largely from tuberculosis) following their enrolment. All of this has been widely known (and properly condemned) for many years; and was made the subject of a national commission, which reported its conclusions in 2015.

What was new in 2021, however, was the bombshell claim that there was a whole set of other residential-school victims—numbering in the hundreds or even thousands—who were secretly dumped into unmarked graves, possibly after being literally murdered by teachers or school administrators.

This was the stuff of horror movies. And the claims—which were accepted credulously at the time—drove Canada into a frenzy of national self-recrimination, with Justin Trudeau himself acting as the leading penitent.

It was only after many months passed, with not a single body or set of human remains being discovered in the areas where the unmarked graves were supposed to have been located, that doubts started to be raised.

As I noted in Quillette, however, there remains a taboo in polite Canadian circles about mentioning this absence of evidence. Yes, reporters now have started to insert words such as “suspected,” “possible” and “plausible” in front of “unmarked graves.” But with only scattered exceptions, most public figures haven’t given any kind of candid accounting for their roles in promoting the now-dubious-seeming 2021 claims in the first place. Instead, they’ve followed a policy of self-censorship.

Some prominent Canadians have even launched a campaign to ban—or at least publicly shame—anyone who dares break this taboo. Their preferred rhetorical tactic is the charge of “denialism”—a term meant to liken targeted individuals to holocaust deniers.

Those leading the anti-“denialism” campaign include Liberal Cabinet Minister Marc Miller, University of Manitoba professor Sean Carleton, and Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor appointed by Trudeau to investigate the issue of unmarked graves. Murray has even suggested that “denialism” should be criminalized—a step that, depending on how the term is defined, could render the act of writing this Substack post a criminal offence.

And yet, no one is denying the general existence of residential schools, nor the facts reported in 2015 by the national commission tasked with studying this disgraceful chapter in Canadian history. Rather, what’s sparked the hunt for “denialists” is the scrutiny being applied to the very specific 2021 claims about Indigenous children being dispatched in cold blood, with the bodies buried secretly.

The only documented evidence for the existence of those claimed unmarked graves consists of ground-penetrating radar signals that, yes, could indicate soil dislocations associated with graves. But they also could indicate any number of other things, including tree roots, old irrigation ditches, pipes, or even previous digs conducted by people looking for old graves.

It’s been two years, and the graves remain theoretical, despite radar data that tells investigators where to look. Whether or not any graves are eventually found, it’s ludicrous to use implicit Holocaust-denial comparisons to smear anyone pointing out the chasm between the original 2021 claims and the available supporting evidence we have in 2023.

What’s worse, even those who seem most impassioned about denouncing (and possibly incarcerating) “denialists” can’t seem to decide what that term means.

This includes the aforementioned Miller, the childhood friend of Trudeau who now serves as the Minister of Crown Indigenous Relations. As I noted in Quillette, Miller has spent the last year and a half denouncing “denialists” for daring to ask for evidence in regard to those 215 unmarked graves—despite the fact that even Miller himself now tacks on the word “suspected” to his “unmarked graves” references.

Which is to say that Miller now (properly) acknowledges the possibility that those unmarked graves may not actually exist. And since Miller presumably doesn’t consider himself to be one of the “denialists” (whose actions he describes as “sickening”), he must have some other (unstated) definition in mind.

One might think that Murray would be more precise with her words, given that she apparently wants to target “denialists” as (literal) criminals. But as I noted in Quillette, her discussion of the subject is as confused as Miller’s:

On page 104 of her report, [Murray] references (1) statements, such as those contained in this article, that scrutinize specific claims being made about suspected graves on specific Indigenous reserves; (2) broader statements that cast doubt on the existence of unmarked graves at any residential school; and (3) even more generalized statements, which serve to “defend the Indian Residential Schools System [and] deny that children suffered physical, sexual, psychological, cultural, and spiritual abuses.” All of these are described by Murray as detestable utterances. But it isn’t clear which, if any, Murray wants to criminalize. At other points in her report, Murray goes further, suggesting that the deniers’ ranks encompass anyone who does not pledge his or her belief that residential schools were instruments of literal genocide. “Failing to acknowledge the deliberate genocidal harm inflicted on Indigenous children becomes a barrier to reconciliation and reinforces a culture of denialism in the Canadian population,” she writes. This would suggest that a person could be a “denier” without saying or writing anything at all, insofar as they had not heeded Murray’s exhortation that “each of us must stand up and speak out” in the manner she prescribes.

As for Carleton, he set out his views in an article co-authored with Niigaan Sinclair, a fellow professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. They denounce the forces of “denialism” as “insidious,” while also conceding that these “denialists” aren’t actually denying the “harms and abuses” that occurred at residential schools. Rather, they argue vaguely, the term “denialist” encompasses anyone who “attempts to twist, downplay, or minimize established facts and survivor accounts.”

To appreciate the bizarrely expansive nature of this description, take a moment to imagine how a public discussion of, say, the COVID pandemic, the Middle East conflict, or the war in Ukraine, would unfold if participants on one side could be denounced as morally akin to holocaust deniers (and possibly even thrown into jail) on the accusation that their arguments served “to twist, downplay, or minimize established facts and survivor accounts.”

(Now consider the fact that the two people making this argument are professors at a Canadian university.)

Given the melodramatic nature of Trudeau’s 2021-era all-in response to the unmarked-graves claims, it will surprise few of my Canadian readers to learn that his justice minister now says he is quite interested to hear more from Murray about her plan to criminalize “denialism.” The prospect that any such (obviously unconstitutional) law would ever get drafted, let alone enacted, seems remote. But the fact that Trudeau’s government feels the need to posture in favour of it—and is even getting support from academics and journalists for doing so—illustrates how farcically untethered from reality the public discussion of the unmarked-graves issue has become. If only these public figures were half as interested in looking for actual evidence as they were in rooting out “denialist” heretics, the truth about what lies beneath the ground would have been unearthed long ago.