Juno News - August 07, 2025


Based prof HUMILIATES CBC reporter, leaves her in tears over unmarked graves LIES


Episode Stats

Length

36 minutes

Words per Minute

175.1364

Word Count

6,324

Sentence Count

365

Misogynist Sentences

7

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. We have a great episode for you
00:00:06.960 today, folks. We have Professor Frances Widowson joining us in just a few minutes. But first,
00:00:12.420 I'm going to spend a bit of time providing some background, giving you a bit of a refresher
00:00:16.660 on what has happened in Canada with the story of the unmarked graves and the legacy media
00:00:22.640 hoax surrounding it. So we're going to go through a timeline. This episode is brought to you by
00:00:27.260 Albertans against no-fault insurance. More on them later. So as you recall, back in May of 2021,
00:00:35.140 the CDC published a bombshell report. This is what the headline said, remains of 215 children
00:00:41.740 found buried at former BC residential school. That report was based on a press release that was put
00:00:49.800 out by the Kamloops Indian Reserve. And let me tell you, the report was based on a preliminary finding.
00:00:56.560 It wasn't a detailed report. It wasn't any hard evidence. It was just a claim that a report was
00:01:01.980 forthcoming. Well, that didn't matter. The report went around the world. And the way that the media
00:01:06.940 covered it globally was even more hysterical than the way the Canadian media reported it. So here you
00:01:12.160 see the New York Times had this headline, horrible history, mass graves of Indigenous children reported
00:01:18.220 in Canada. And so you can see how they went from unmarked graves to a mass grave. While the Canadian
00:01:24.940 media quickly followed suit, the Toronto Star and others started calling them mass graves. Here is
00:01:30.180 a report just three days later, May 31st, 2021, from the Toronto Star, mass grave of Indigenous children
00:01:36.740 discovered at Kamloops, BC. We all remember how at the time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau jumped on these
00:01:44.560 allegations. He wanted to be in front of them. He wanted to be Mr. Compassionate. And so here he was
00:01:49.160 photographed at one of the sites of another First Nations reserve, this one in Saskatchewan,
00:01:55.600 that claimed to have found 751 unmarked graves, part of the same moral panic and story. And of course,
00:02:02.840 Prime Minister was more than happy to do his photo op there. In reality, that one cemetery is worth
00:02:09.780 pointing out in Saskatchewan. That was not part of the residential school. Even in the initial Globe
00:02:15.780 and Mail report that was published on July 19, 2021, tucked away at the end of the report, it quotes a
00:02:22.420 band leader who said that they knew about the cemetery, that everybody knew about the cemetery.
00:02:27.580 It was a rural municipal cemetery. It had people that were Indigenous and non-Indigenous buried there,
00:02:35.020 and it was known by the entire community. That doesn't matter. The media narrative had already
00:02:39.340 taken off on its own. By the end of 2021, here is the Canadian press named the discovery of the
00:02:45.880 unmarked graves as the story of the year. It certainly was the most impactful, the most important
00:02:52.720 story of 2021. Part of the problem, folks, to be perfectly honest, is that there was no pushback,
00:02:57.660 right? Even the Conservative Party of Canada was more than happy to go along with this. They even
00:03:01.940 participated in a motion in the House of Commons saying that genocide was committed. Of course,
00:03:07.880 no such thing happened. Us at True North and here at the Candace Malcolm Show, we didn't buy it from
00:03:12.600 the very beginning. We were skeptical. We were asking questions. In fact, in 2021, the same year,
00:03:17.680 the Candace Malcolm Show, we named it the biggest fake news narrative of the year. It landed at number
00:03:24.180 one. And I also published this piece earlier in the year, back in July of 2021, the six things the
00:03:30.120 media got wrong about the graves found near the residential schools. I should have written the
00:03:34.880 alleged graves found near the residential schools. That became the most read article in the history
00:03:40.300 of True North. It was later surpassed by Cosmic Church's reporting on the maps of the churches that
00:03:45.040 have been burnt. We had a map of Canada and we kept track of all of the churches that have been
00:03:49.360 vandalized or burnt down or victims of arson. I think the total number is over 125 now. And that has
00:03:56.240 since become the number one piece that we have reported. But still, we were part of the small
00:04:02.060 handful of Canadians that were pushing back against this narrative. And look, folks, the truth has come
00:04:08.540 out. The truth has come out. More and more Canadians know that this story is not based on facts. There have
00:04:15.440 been no human remains found at these residential schools. In Kamloops, there hasn't been any kind of
00:04:20.900 excavation at all. It's based on very sort of preliminary science and something called ground
00:04:25.640 penetrating radar that suspects that there are anomalies. They don't even call them graves anymore.
00:04:31.460 They call them anomalies. The few places where there have been excavations, no remains have found. And
00:04:37.580 even the legacy media has been forced to admit that. So here is the CBC reporting in August of 2023,
00:04:43.480 no evidence of human remains found beneath the church at Pine Creek residential school sites. That was
00:04:49.280 another one of these sites that was claimed to have bodies been found. When they did the excavation,
00:04:55.100 none were found. There are several other examples of places where there have been excavations in
00:05:00.580 August 2021. In Nova Scotia, they conducted an excavation at a former site of residential school.
00:05:06.240 No bones were found. There's allegations of clandestine burials. Nothing was found. And then again,
00:05:12.820 in Edmonton, in October of 2021, there was an excavation done at the Camsell Hospital. And once again,
00:05:19.280 no human remains were found. And so that is where we are today. I'm very pleased that True North was
00:05:26.120 part of an important book that was published. We published this book called Grave Error. It was
00:05:31.720 published in December of 2023. It quickly became the number one bestselling book on Amazon in Canada,
00:05:38.820 became a Canadian bestseller. And one of the authors is a collection of essays. It's edited by Dr.
00:05:44.840 Champion and Tom Flanagan, a retired professor at the University of Calgary. One of the contributors
00:05:49.400 to that book is Frances Whittowson. She is a political scientist and a free speech activist.
00:05:54.940 She was an associate professor at Mount Royal University from 2008 until she was dismissed in 2021.
00:06:01.120 I'm very pleased to welcome her to the show today. Frances, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:06:05.340 Thanks for having me on. Well, first, I want to say that you were dismissed from your role at the
00:06:11.920 Mount Royal University, but then your dismissal was deemed to be disproportionate. So after an
00:06:19.280 arbiter ruled that the university had acted disproportionately when they dismissed you. So
00:06:25.800 why don't you tell us what is the latest with you and Mount Royal University in Calgary?
00:06:30.300 Yes. So that decision came down last year. But unfortunately, the arbitrator decided that
00:06:40.200 although I had been unjustly terminated, I could not be reinstated because of the friction that
00:06:46.880 supposedly existed between me and a number of scholar activists at Mount Royal University who cannot
00:06:53.200 tolerate their views being questioned. So my case is being appealed to the Alberta
00:07:00.200 Labor Relations Board and that appeal is going to be heard in December of this year. So we'll find
00:07:06.780 out whether hopefully the Alberta Labor Relations Board will seriously look at this case. The arbitrator's
00:07:14.680 decision, in my view, was seriously flawed and the union agrees as well. So hopefully I will be
00:07:21.960 reinstated very shortly to Mount Royal University and be back doing my research and classroom activities
00:07:28.760 and providing a much-needed counterbalance to the advocacy that is going on at Mount Royal University
00:07:36.340 around things like the unmarked graves and the false claims that were made about that.
00:07:41.580 Well, I think the students at that university would be very lucky to have you back there. So let's talk a
00:07:47.340 little bit about the book Gravaire. So we published it at the very end of 2023. We just felt like we
00:07:53.340 needed to have a counter piece of evidence, right? There's so much misinformation floating around in
00:07:58.780 the media. And because of that, there's a perception, I think, in the minds of too many Canadians
00:08:03.180 that something horrible, something akin to genocide happened at schools across the country. We just wanted
00:08:08.860 something to be able to point to and say, well, like, hear the other side of the story. Hear the side of the
00:08:13.500 story that most Canadians believed up until about five years ago. And so you did a great service by
00:08:20.700 providing that. Tell us a little bit about why you want to be involved in this project and then
00:08:24.620 some of the reaction to the book from your perspective. So I wanted to be involved because
00:08:32.700 from very early on, and just like yourself, I was quite skeptical about the claim that was made in May
00:08:38.860 2021, because I had been studying the residential schools since, I guess, 2016, after the Truth and
00:08:46.780 Reconciliation Report came out. And I thought that the report was very unbalanced and advocacy oriented
00:08:54.300 and needed to be critically analyzed. And then when this claim came out, we actually held an event in
00:09:00.780 on July 10th, 2021, with Brian Giesbrecht and Rodney Clifton, where we were raising the alarm about how
00:09:09.340 this was premature, claiming that remains have been found. And Brian Giesbrecht, in fact, raised the issue
00:09:16.380 of the cemeteries, the abandoned cemeteries, of which there are many. But it turns out that Kamloops is not
00:09:22.940 an abandoned cemetery because it is the apple orchard. And there's actually a cemetery on the reserve.
00:09:30.540 itself, where some children from the residential school are buried. And there are many unmarked
00:09:35.900 graves, graves that are now unmarked in that cemetery, because the markers have deteriorated.
00:09:42.220 So I sense that there were, there were some problems with these claims, and I wanted them to
00:09:47.500 be investigated. But it was a really, it was a huge battle, trying to get pieces published to critique
00:09:56.620 that claim. And this book was the first initiative, kind of written initiative, a compilation of the
00:10:05.180 work of all the critics who had been working on this issue for a few years by the time that that book
00:10:12.380 came out.
00:10:12.860 Well, it's interesting, Frances, because at the time when this happened, I was still writing in
00:10:17.340 the Toronto Sun. I wrote for the Toronto Sun for about eight years, finishing at the end of 2021. And so,
00:10:22.140 initially, I was writing columns on these stories, and I had no pushback whatsoever from my editor.
00:10:27.420 They actually liked it because it was an interesting other side of the story, even though I will tell
00:10:30.940 you in my personal life, friends, even professional colleagues, even people at True North were opposed
00:10:36.700 to what I was doing. Like I had a member of our board quit. I had an editor quit and rage over this
00:10:40.860 stuff. Like they really didn't like this because it was so sensitive at the time, right? Everybody was so
00:10:47.660 careful and worried, and they didn't want to be seen as sensitive. And even conservatives said,
00:10:51.420 well, you know, we didn't like the idea of residential schools because it's a big government
00:10:54.780 program, etc, etc. By the end of 2021, the Toronto Sun told me that I was no longer welcome to publish
00:11:01.660 pieces. They didn't tell me why. But this was the kind of thing that I was writing a lot. And like I
00:11:06.380 said, I said that it was the biggest hoax of 2021. So connecting those lines, I think that it was part of
00:11:11.740 the reason. And you're right, there was almost no coverage of this in the legacy media, despite so
00:11:17.100 many voices and so many people just asking really basic questions, not even making any claims, just
00:11:23.660 asking questions about like, you know, what the accusations were and, and asking for more facts. Now,
00:11:29.900 I want to move this along. So in March of 2024, so some three months after this book was published,
00:11:37.420 basically, there was a controversy at the Quesnel City Council, because this book was distributed to
00:11:46.540 members of the City Council by the wife of the mayor. And so the Quesnel City Council voted unanimously
00:11:53.820 to denounce this book, saying that it downplayed the harms of the residential schools and First Nations,
00:11:59.340 and councillors raised concerns that the mayor's wife had been distributing it. And so at that point,
00:12:04.300 you were invited or you decided to travel to Quesnel to speak at a City Council meeting. And I have a
00:12:11.580 clip from the from the City Council meeting, where you were basically told that you were not welcome
00:12:19.420 there. Let's let's play that clip. Does the Council concern itself with misinformation? Is it opposed to
00:12:26.220 misinformation being spread and entered into the record? If so, does it agree that this is
00:12:33.740 misinformation because there is no evidence of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential
00:12:43.100 School? Her opinion in this in this chambers does not count. She's asking us to comment on something
00:12:49.260 that comes from qualified individuals that dealt with this that lived through this. Ma'am,
00:12:54.700 you are not welcome here. So I mean, what a scene, right? Hundreds of people showing up heckling you,
00:13:00.780 booing you and you just stating the facts, being very calm and measured, and sort of a hysterical
00:13:06.060 reaction to you. So walk us through what happened? What brought you to Quesnel and some background to
00:13:11.740 that? Yeah, so Pat Morton, as soon as I heard that Pat Morton was under fire for just sharing the book
00:13:20.220 with a friend and sending a copy to the school board saying that they might consider having it in their
00:13:27.340 library. She got her husband, the mayor, got attacked. He was being attacked because of her,
00:13:35.260 what she had done. Unfortunately, he sort of allowed himself to be, you know, drawn into this
00:13:41.820 discussion when he should have just said, look, my wife is not a public figure. She's allowed to share
00:13:46.940 books with whoever she wants. Anyway, things started to get really nasty in Quesnel. And for example,
00:13:54.620 her son has a tax business, and the band was, you know, withdrew its business. And there was,
00:14:02.060 you know, it's a very small community, so it was not pleasant. And she heard there was going to be
00:14:06.300 this terrible protest that was going to be happening. So she asked if any, you know, person who was a
00:14:11.340 contributor to Grave Era could come. And because I was in Calgary, I was, I was sort of the person to
00:14:17.420 decide, like, I volunteered to do it and drive to Quesnel. And when I arrived there and was in the
00:14:24.860 gallery, we were supposed to be given some time about a, I'm not sure what the time limit, I heard
00:14:30.940 that we were going to be given, everyone was going to be given a certain amount of time to make a
00:14:34.700 statement. But I thought that that was going to be unlikely. So I knew, according to the rules,
00:14:39.500 you could pose a question from the gallery. So I had both, both things planned. And then
00:14:46.060 when I went up there, they allowed the Aboriginal, you know, representatives to talk for, you know,
00:14:53.660 minutes on end about things completely unrelated to the agenda. And then they strictly controlled
00:14:59.260 what Pat Morton and I could say. And then but I had my question, the most important question,
00:15:04.940 which was in this document from the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations. They had
00:15:09.980 the false claim that remains of, or graves of 215 children have been found. And so I was asking a
00:15:16.140 question specifically on that. And I was booed and treated absolutely horribly by these two councillors,
00:15:23.500 Scott Elliott and another councillor's name is Laurie Ann Rudenberg. They were unbelievable in their
00:15:31.100 totalitarianism. And that whole meeting was a circus. And it is and Pat Morton was treated,
00:15:37.740 she was treated worse than me. So the whole thing was just an embarrassment for that city council. And
00:15:43.580 there's a number of city councils who have similar problems, Powell River City Council, and also Sechelt
00:15:49.500 City Council. So it's a very dysfunctional situation in terms of the, you know, Aboriginal groups being able
00:15:55.260 to control what happens in city councils now. Well, we're going to get to the documentary that you
00:16:01.500 published, I think it was last month, where you do an excellent job sort of outlining the sort of
00:16:06.380 post-truth world that we live in, where people don't even care about the truth. And you can say,
00:16:10.460 like, hey, you said that this book is racist. Can you give me an example of how it's racist?
00:16:15.260 And they'll basically accuse you of being racist for just even asking that question and saying that they
00:16:19.900 don't need to have any evidence whatsoever. I want to talk about your interview with the CBC
00:16:25.980 and with their young reporter out there named Dorden Tucker, which they thankfully, you recorded
00:16:31.580 your own side of it, because this was an absolute train wreck, and so embarrassing on behalf of the
00:16:38.380 CBC. So this is all in the context of you going up to Quenelle. Maybe before I start playing some clips,
00:16:45.180 can you sort of walk us through how this interview came to be? Did she just sort of reach out to you
00:16:50.540 out of the blue? Or had you been communicating with her in the past? Let me just give us a bit of
00:16:54.060 background. Yes, so I never heard of her, I'd never interacted with her. She had obviously heard that I
00:17:00.780 was coming to Quenelle, and, you know, wanted to, you know, find out if there were nefarious things at
00:17:09.020 work. And, and so she set up an interview with me. And I think this was the day before or a couple,
00:17:14.380 two days before I went to Quenelle. And then we had, she, we set up a Zoom call. This was on Zoom.
00:17:22.780 I wish I had a screen, you know, and I now know how to screen record. I wish I'd had a screen
00:17:27.260 recording of that, but I just had audio on it. And I was, I was, I've never had an interview like
00:17:32.940 that before. I've had bad interviews, but usually the interviews are quite professional. It's in the
00:17:39.100 actual piece that is produced afterwards where the problem arises. But this interview, right from the
00:17:45.020 start, she was making all these accusations and that what, that's what got me in such a
00:17:49.740 confrontational kind of position is because I was being asked all these questions about who was
00:17:56.060 paying for my trip and whether I was financially benefiting from it. You know, when, you know, I was
00:18:01.180 taking a great deal of time out of my own schedule, I was getting, you know, probably going to get some
00:18:06.540 expenses paid, but I wasn't making any money off of it. I was doing it purely to ensure that the
00:18:12.540 city council was held to account for the libelous things that they were saying about, you know, the
00:18:20.460 contributors of the book Grave Error. Okay. We've got a bunch of clips that we are going to play just
00:18:25.740 in a moment, folks. I want to take a second though, to thank the sponsor of today's episode, which is
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00:19:08.380 AlbertansAgainstNoFault.com. That's AlbertansAgainstNoFault.com. All right, Francis, I want to play,
00:19:15.900 let's go with the first clip that we have here, which is alluding to what you were saying, where the
00:19:21.100 interviewer, Jordan Tucker, a CVC reporter, is pressing you on who's covering your travel funds. And then I
00:19:27.900 spliced it together with a clip later on where you talk about how she's wondering, you know,
00:19:32.220 why would people invent or embellish these claims? And you said, well, the government has given them
00:19:37.020 seven million dollars, so that's pretty good incentive, seven million dollars, pretty good
00:19:40.300 incentive to exaggerate your story. And she kind of like shrugs it off like, oh, who cares about seven
00:19:45.260 million dollars? So let's play that clip, please. Are you being, are your travel expenses being paid
00:19:51.340 by anyone? Or are you paying them yourself? We'll see what, what washes out of the whole thing.
00:19:59.340 What do you mean by that? It depends on how much the expenses are,
00:20:03.660 but I don't really see why I have to justify my, my travel to Quesnel to people. I'm coming
00:20:11.580 perfectly... Well, if you were invited. I was invited, yes. And you won't tell me by who,
00:20:16.220 and I'm wondering, are you selling books? What's your motivation to go?
00:20:20.300 First of all, I receive no money whatsoever for the books.
00:20:25.100 Don't you think that it's quite like a lot, a lot of trouble to go to, to say that 215 children
00:20:34.140 died in order to get seven million dollars? There's a lot of other ways to get seven million dollars.
00:20:39.420 I just, I, you, you could have made this up, right? First, you could sense in her voice just how
00:20:43.660 insecure she is, how whiny, she just seems really upset. She doesn't want to have to justify anything
00:20:48.620 she's doing. And, and, and she's really concerned over, I don't know, I don't know what gas money from
00:20:54.060 Calgary to Quesnel is, maybe a few hundred dollars. And then like in the same breath, she's like, oh,
00:20:59.820 seven, there's a lot of ways to get seven million dollars. Just totally unbelievable. I want to play one
00:21:04.460 more clip for you here. This is unbelievable. This, this goes to show folks how ill-informed some members
00:21:11.260 of the press are and sadly how many Canadians are. So, so the, the reporter again, you know,
00:21:16.540 you would think that she would come to an interview prepared with facts, with research,
00:21:21.900 probably having read the book, or at least the chapter that you could review. You know, you,
00:21:25.660 you just wrote one, one chapter of the book. I think it's like 20, 25 pages. I get that it's not
00:21:29.900 the easiest book to read, but you can get it at libraries across Canada. You could go and pick this
00:21:34.140 book up, read it for free. Just, just even read Francis's one essay in there. You could tell
00:21:40.540 she didn't do that. And in the interview, she claims, she claims as fact that 6,000 bodies have
00:21:47.660 been found, 6,000 bodies. And you asked her, her source. And she said the Truth and Reconciliation
00:21:52.940 Commission report, which is a written report that came out in 2015. It doesn't even make any sense.
00:21:57.980 These claims of unmarked graves didn't come out until 2021. You just get a snapshot of just how
00:22:04.540 ignorant these people are. Let's play that clip, please.
00:22:06.460 Because there's, there's been over 6,000 bodies found at this point. Are all of those?
00:22:13.660 What bodies, what bodies have been found?
00:22:17.500 I, I'm going with information from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and then various other
00:22:22.540 government bodies. No, no, but you said 6,000 bodies have been found.
00:22:27.100 That's the current, that's the current number. Yeah. That's all.
00:22:31.180 And you say the Truth and Reconciliation Commission says that 6,000 bodies have been found?
00:22:38.620 Can I complete my questions, please?
00:22:40.220 I'm just, you're the one who made that claim. And as a journalist,
00:22:44.460 you should be concerned about the accuracy of your claims.
00:22:47.180 Unbelievable. So I guess just, what was it, what was it like to be met with a CBC reporter like that?
00:22:55.500 I was, I was amazed. I, I've never seen a level of incompetence. And, you know, she's not a,
00:23:01.980 you know, the head of the broadcasting department or anything. She's obviously sort of freelance and
00:23:08.780 so on. But still, the CBC used to be, you know, an important media institution that would have had
00:23:16.940 some oversight and be training its, the people that work for it to do proper journalism. And that's
00:23:23.340 obviously not happening at all anymore. Well, absolutely. And so I'll just play one more clip
00:23:28.220 from this interview. And folks, if you want to watch the whole thing, it's well worth your time.
00:23:31.900 Frances has put it up on her YouTube page. We'll link that in the description. So you can go,
00:23:36.540 you'll either be like wildly entertained, or just like sorely depressed at the state of the thinking
00:23:43.580 behind the journalists in this country. But here is how the interview ends, which is Frances
00:23:49.740 rightly calling this journalist out and discrediting her credibility. Let's play that clip.
00:23:55.900 I think you really need to read that book, because you do not have an understanding at all.
00:24:01.180 Ma'am, I don't need that from you. Thank you.
00:24:03.260 Well, you are a seriously incompetent journalist. And this is what the CBC has sunk to these days.
00:24:13.020 I don't think that you accusing me or shouting at me is very helpful
00:24:17.740 to your case. Well, I don't really think I'm shouting at you. I'm just telling you,
00:24:22.380 for someone who is here doing an interview on this case. Ma'am, please stop. Please stop. That's
00:24:28.460 enough. This interview is now over. Thank you for your time.
00:24:34.060 I mean, just not to not to be too cruel to this young lady, but she was so unprepared for the
00:24:39.500 interview. And any time you called her on her BS or called her out for pushing total lies, she would
00:24:46.140 just like break character and be like, I don't need this from you or like stop shouting at me or
00:24:51.980 stop interrupting me. And it's like, this is how you have a debate, right? It's like you're making
00:24:56.860 claims that are false. So the person you're interviewing is calling you out on that.
00:25:01.340 And rather than trying to back it up, she just sort of gets upset and pouts and has a temper tantrum.
00:25:08.300 Okay, Frances, I want to show the audience what the CBC published, because this is just classic CBC
00:25:14.620 deception, right? She records this long interview with you where she stumbles through the facts. She
00:25:20.140 can't get her questions out. And then she gets upset. I think she was in tears and she ended the
00:25:25.020 interview. And yet, to the CBC audience, this is I believe it was a radio segment because we just
00:25:30.300 had the soundbite of it. But this is how they presented it to the public. Let's play that soft
00:25:35.740 five. After indigenous leaders called it harmful and painful. As Jordan Tucker tells us, the author
00:25:42.060 won't say who invited her or if she's being paid for travel costs. There's terrible censoriousness.
00:25:48.140 Frances Widowson co wrote a book casting doubt on the harmfulness of Canada's residential schools.
00:25:53.980 A former professor, she was fired from Calgary's Mount Royal University three years ago,
00:25:58.940 following her comments on the residential school system and the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:26:03.660 The book features articles contesting evidence of unmarked graves at sites across the country.
00:26:08.620 As occurred in the case of the satanic panic, they are people who are distressed,
00:26:14.940 who have their memories influenced by these sorts of things.
00:26:19.020 Unbelievable, Frances. This is why it's so important, folks. Anytime you're
00:26:23.260 being interviewed by a CBC or any journalist, record it yourself. Have your own copy of it so
00:26:29.180 that you can bring the receipts and show the world the real interview. But what did you make of all that?
00:26:35.980 Yes, and the most serious thing, and I think it's very valuable for people to look at that interview
00:26:42.860 because it shows the thought process of not just this particular journalist, but people who believe
00:26:49.820 this claim. And it was about her arguing that the 215 bodies have been found. We got into a big
00:26:57.180 skirmish about this. And she said that, you know, why would, you know, all these smart people in the
00:27:02.620 government, why would they believe this if it weren't true? Like, this is a journalist. A journalist is
00:27:08.300 supposed to be, you know, holding leaders to account and so on. But she has been completely
00:27:13.420 credulous in her, you know, in her interaction with leaders, you know, politicians, Aboriginal leaders,
00:27:22.380 and so on. So I think it's a very valuable thing to look at just from the thought processes that are
00:27:29.260 going on about this case. Well, in your chapter in Grave Error, you do talk about the moral panic
00:27:37.020 of the 1980s with the satanic daycare scandal, which I didn't know that much about. I learned
00:27:41.420 it from your book. But it seemed like in the interview, she was kind of drawing you down a
00:27:44.860 bit of a rabbit hole. And then she took that one little clip and kind of played it out of context
00:27:49.500 to make it seem like you were talking about satanic rituals or something like that. Like it was,
00:27:53.500 it was just classic bait and switch, like deceptive journalism. And I'm glad that you again posted it
00:28:01.340 so that Canadians can see, okay, Francis, I want to move on to this excellent documentary that you
00:28:06.140 have released. And I don't know when it was published, but I watched it a few days ago,
00:28:12.140 and it really is worth your time. It's called What Remains Exposing the Kamloops Massgrave
00:28:16.540 Deception's Impact on Powell River. So can you tell us about why you chose to do a documentary
00:28:23.180 on Powell River, right? Like, I think that a lot of people are focusing on what's happening in
00:28:27.500 Kamloops and that Indian reservation. Talk to us about what's happening in Powell River.
00:28:33.980 Yeah, so this documentary is actually the initial one in a series that Simon Haregott, who is a
00:28:40.940 videographer and journalist, he was a journalist who worked for Global News for 10 years, and was fired
00:28:46.780 because of his opposition to the media outlets coverage of a number of issues. He's an
00:28:52.780 incredible talent. And he was the one who did most of the work on this documentary, I was involved in
00:28:59.660 and sort of with some of the background information that I had and, and obviously was featured in it.
00:29:06.220 But anyway, we're planning on doing another more in depth kinds of examinations in the Kamloops case
00:29:14.220 itself, and the massive institutional failure that is, that has happened in the media, in the school
00:29:22.060 board, the universities, and all these institutions, which really explain why this deception has taken
00:29:29.580 root. But what people don't understand is that although this happened in Kamloops, this claim that was
00:29:36.140 made in May 2021 has had far-reaching consequences. And one of the consequences was in the town of Powell River,
00:29:47.340 where this claim was used by the chief of the local Indian band to demand, to make the demand that the
00:29:55.180 town's name should be changed. And it turns out, and another reason was that the town was supposedly
00:30:02.540 named after Israel Wood Powell, who was the superintendent, who was a head official in the
00:30:07.980 Department of Indian Affairs. It turns out that the town was not even named after Israel Wood Powell,
00:30:13.500 it was named after Edward Powell, who was a cartographer who had mapped the area. So both of the claims behind
00:30:20.940 why this town's name should be changed were not correct, yet they're still continuing to press for
00:30:27.180 this. And this has completely ripped apart this community. And this is the kind of thing that these
00:30:34.060 so-called truth and reconciliation efforts do, is that they have nothing to do with truth. It is about,
00:30:40.700 you know, these fomenting these falsehoods so that, you know, grievances can be stirred up. And then,
00:30:46.940 of course, it results in all these fights between people, which then benefit all the legal disputes
00:30:54.620 that are going to emerge out of all these interactions. And one of the biggest things
00:30:59.580 that's happened that has also impacted Powell River is the Kamloops claim was used to push through
00:31:06.220 the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into federal legislation. There
00:31:12.300 was opposition from both the Conservative Party and six provinces. And when that claim was made,
00:31:18.540 everyone just was saying, well, what can we do to right this wrong? And that allowed that
00:31:23.660 legislation to be pushed through. So now we've got to deal with a whole bunch of implications of what
00:31:30.300 it means to have this kind of internationalist notion undermine Canadian sovereignty and all the
00:31:38.540 disputes, all the legal disputes that are going to result from that. So we went into Powell River,
00:31:43.980 Simon Hergott and me, and did a lot of footage of the various kinds of problems that existed in Powell
00:31:50.940 River. And it was quite a fascinating case study, which showed a lot of the, you know, flawed thought
00:31:57.580 processes that are occurring with respect to the Kamloops case.
00:32:00.780 Well, you do an excellent job, the documentary does an excellent job debunking some of the
00:32:05.340 prevalences, exposing the sort of industry around First Nations, like the consultants, and sometimes
00:32:11.020 even the academic professors. You debunked a New York Times documentary or clip segment pretending to
00:32:18.780 show that they had found babies buried. And you had a geophysicist who said, there's no way, you know,
00:32:24.140 these images of the guys showing on the screen are maybe 10 to 12 centimeters. Those aren't remains
00:32:29.820 of humans. Those are probably boulders or animal burrows. There's another part where a protester shows up to
00:32:37.420 protest you, you confront her. We're going to play this clip of you just trying to engage with a
00:32:43.180 protestor and just showing how totally unprepared and unwilling these people are to debate their ideas.
00:32:49.420 Let's play Saud 8, please.
00:32:50.540 Could you explain to me your position?
00:32:53.260 No.
00:32:53.420 Are you not interested in what my arguments are?
00:32:58.220 I know what they are.
00:33:00.060 Okay, so what are my arguments?
00:33:03.980 I don't need to speak your work back to you. I'm not in a lecture. I'm not your student. I won't be
00:33:11.740 summarizing your work for you.
00:33:14.060 No, but do you want to be accurate in your, the way you're portraying my work?
00:33:18.940 Do you think that being accurate?
00:33:20.140 You think your work isn't racist.
00:33:22.380 Um, but you think it is?
00:33:24.300 Yes.
00:33:24.860 So why do you think it's racist?
00:33:27.100 It fully is racist.
00:33:29.020 But, but what, if you're going to say that my work is racist,
00:33:33.500 don't you think that you have a responsibility to say why you think it's racist?
00:33:37.260 Not to you.
00:33:37.980 So, you know, I, it, it, it, it would be funny again, if it weren't so depressing,
00:33:45.020 the state of our country and how these people are totally unwilling.
00:33:47.980 Like I was even looking, Francis, I was looking before this episode to see if anyone had written
00:33:51.820 a thoughtful rebuke or like criticism of grave error to see if, if anyone had kind of gone through
00:33:58.380 it and tried to debunk it. And for best I could tell, there hasn't been any effort to do anything
00:34:03.180 like that. Um, there's another, uh, part in your video that just sort of shows, it's almost like
00:34:08.140 a nihilism, right? It's like, people don't care about what the truth is. They, they just care
00:34:13.100 that someone's truth. It's like, we have to respect their truth. Um, and it, it, it does sort of show,
00:34:19.020 um, a sad state of affairs in British Columbia. Any, any final thoughts and where can people,
00:34:23.740 uh, find the documentary? Yes. So it's on YouTube. Uh, the, the documentary, uh, you can just,
00:34:31.500 uh, it's Francis Whittleson 1600. Um, and we are now fundraising to try to produce a whole bunch of
00:34:39.100 other related documentaries on the institutional failure that has surrounded the Kamloops case,
00:34:45.660 um, especially in the universities and in the media, but also institutions like the RCMP
00:34:53.500 and the school board and the coroner's office, just endless institutions that if they had been
00:34:59.820 operating properly, they would have been able to sound the alarm and, you know, created a bit of
00:35:06.060 caution about people making these outlandish claims. And it just doesn't stop because now we
00:35:12.860 have the Cooper Island residential school case, which is just as crazy. And everyone, all the journalists
00:35:19.820 are just covering this in the exact same way, which is just completely lacking in any kind of skepticism
00:35:26.540 and any kind of critical questioning of the claims that, uh, Aboriginal leaders and their lawyers and
00:35:33.260 their consultants are making with respect to these unmarked, unmarked graves. Well, I definitely
00:35:38.700 encourage everyone to go out and watch the documentary and support Francis's work, allow her to do more of
00:35:43.420 these important documentaries to help get the truth out there. Francis, thank you so much for your time and
00:35:47.980 keep up the great work. Thanks for, thanks for having me on. All right, folks, that's all the time we
00:35:52.380 have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm. This is the Candace Malcolm Show.
00:35:55.260 Thank you and God bless.
00:36:04.540 you