Juno News - Book bans, mass graves, and the war on truth in Canadian schools

00:00:00.000 Saying something that may cause discomfort, even if that something is true, can be considered hate speech in Canada.

00:00:08.080 It doesn't matter whether the speech is true or an opinion expressed in good faith with the utmost respectful tone.

00:00:14.380 Now, if what you say doesn't match the approved narrative around a sensitive subject, you could lose your job.

00:00:20.220 And for many in this situation, it could even mean a ruined relationship or two or ruined reputation.

00:00:26.300 That's exactly what happened to my guest today.

00:00:29.160 Jim McMurtry was fired from his job as a teacher for stating inconvenient facts about residential schools.

00:00:35.980 I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

00:00:46.860 If you haven't come across Jim's story, he used to be a teacher in British Columbia.

00:00:51.820 He came to the job rather well-educated, with a PhD in education, with a specialization in Indigenous history.

00:00:59.860 But in May 2021, news of residential school mass graves triggered a wave of national and international media coverage.

00:01:08.100 During a class discussion, a student brought up the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School.

00:01:15.060 Naturally, it was a huge deal at the time.

00:01:18.540 Now, Jim, knowing a fair amount on the topic, explained that most deaths were likely caused by disease and probably not murder.

00:01:26.520 But for his answer, he was put through the bureaucratic disciplinary grinder and eventually terminated.

00:01:32.460 And it wasn't that he lied. It was that he contradicted the official narrative Jim wrote about his experience in his new book.

00:01:39.980 Now, contrast that with recent events transpiring in Alberta.

00:01:44.840 The government there announced a book review of library materials of a rather salacious and questionable nature,

00:01:53.120 asking whether sexually explicit or age-inappropriate content should remain available to minors.

00:02:00.000 Predictably, and rather swiftly, progressives called the move book banning.

00:02:04.920 And here in Ontario, one school board pulled a similar, let's not call it a book ban, book ban,

00:02:12.260 by removing all books published before 2008 to avoid potential offense.

00:02:18.360 They called it weeding.

00:02:20.180 At least some of the eyebrows raised were non-partisan in that case.

00:02:24.400 But all of this leaves me mulling over the meaning of free speech in Canada.

00:02:29.360 Hi, Jim. Thank you for joining me.

00:02:31.580 It's a pleasure, Melanie.

00:02:32.560 I read your book. I have it here.

00:02:37.000 Well, I did. I must admit, I didn't have a chance to read it all because I only just got it.

00:02:40.660 I read it in sections and I wanted to note that it's pretty light in tone,

00:02:47.800 even though the content is is pretty heavy.

00:02:49.820 It's what is what happened to you.

00:02:51.500 Do you want to perhaps maybe start off the episode by giving us a Coles notes about the book?

00:02:56.900 Well, thank you.

00:02:57.740 So after I lost my job, I was really given three choices.

00:03:02.100 A psychologist would say to fight, to be defeated, or to appease my adversaries.

00:03:09.000 And I chose to fight because I had to live with myself.

00:03:12.740 I didn't say anything wrong.

00:03:14.280 It's been that book makes that very clear.

00:03:17.080 I think our whole society knows that what I was walked out of the classroom for saying is was true

00:03:22.940 and that there wasn't mass murder and mass graves and mass mistreatment of children in residential schools,

00:03:30.700 despite three years ago, all the parliamentarians in Canada calling the residential school project genocide.

00:03:38.020 Yeah, well, one of the reasons, well, the main reason I wanted to talk to you today was I've been noticing some a lot of talk about book banning.

00:03:48.120 I'll just remind the audience that a couple of weeks ago, the Alberta Ministry of Education announced a review that they'd be conducting a review

00:03:55.220 of the books found in their libraries.

00:03:58.700 They found some books with sexual content in them and some other inappropriate things.

00:04:03.440 And although they didn't say they were going to ban a specific book, they launched this review.

00:04:08.780 Now, the interesting thing about this case and the reason I want to talk to you about it is many people came out immediately condemning this as a potential book ban.

00:04:19.140 But we know that it's illegal to present sexually explicit material to minors, right?

00:04:27.480 So perhaps if it is a book ban, perhaps we should be doing that because we already do.

00:04:32.260 It's legal. But in contrast to you, you put you your launch for your book was at a school was at your old school, was it not?

00:04:40.540 Yes. And they just they tried to they shut it down.

00:04:44.100 They evacuated the whole school with two hours to go in a workday.

00:04:48.600 And they've accused me, of course, of not being educationally right.

00:04:53.240 And they take away that time for kids at school and they didn't tell the kids and they worked really hard with police officers to make sure that the kids didn't approach me and all it was there.

00:05:03.880 What do you mean evacuated?

00:05:05.000 They moved all the kids out of the school. So it was the same drill as with a fire alarm.

00:05:10.700 Like when you have a fire.

00:05:11.960 Yeah, that's right. So they move all the kids out. They don't have them running.

00:05:15.040 They had them all in their backpacks because they were going home.

00:05:17.900 And I was able to speak to some kids, but they're the ones that came back two hours later because their parents were picking them up at the school.

00:05:23.500 So even though they evacuated school, so they wouldn't they wouldn't.

00:05:27.120 It wasn't me they were avoiding. It's the idea.

00:05:29.760 And the idea is that they lied to kids four years ago about what happened in Kamloops.

00:05:34.860 And they've never nowhere in Canada have any of these people gone back.

00:05:39.300 And so, by the way, we were wrong.

00:05:40.700 We had you crying and wearing orange all year long and thinking Canada was this terrible country.

00:05:46.680 We were wrong. That's not happening.

00:05:48.720 So it's really I'm sort of a little bit like Emanuel Goldstein in the novel 1984.

00:05:54.140 You know, it doesn't matter if he exists or not.

00:05:56.780 It's the idea itself can't be destroyed.

00:05:59.540 And the idea that I'm referring to is truth that I don't think you can manipulate or defame or twist history and get away with it for long.

00:06:08.920 But they're still trying.

00:06:10.220 So did they come out with any the school, for example, did they come out with any public announcement about that situation at all or public statement?

00:06:17.500 Well, you know, this is really interesting and I'm delighted.

00:06:20.920 I'm just a little old me here.

00:06:22.320 So I put out of my ex account that I was going to my old school because nobody seems to care about the fact that, you know, even four years later, nobody's dinging and we all know it was a hoax.

00:06:37.720 And so I said I was going to go.

00:06:39.120 So that was Wednesday night of last week.

00:06:40.760 Thursday, when I came home around dinner hour, there was a white envelope stuck door height into the wedge in my door, front door.

00:06:50.160 And it was a very threatening letter from my school board.

00:06:52.900 So I don't know how they were able to move that quickly because it was a letter that was clearly vetted by lawyers.

00:06:57.620 So how did they late Wednesday night know what I had posted and within 24 hours have that threading letter saying that I was intimidating students and affecting and obviously in a negative way the mental health of indigenous students.

00:07:12.460 And then the next day was was my book launch across the street from the school and with with a number of people and so forth.

00:07:20.960 Very peaceful, even though the police were there and some of the people with me were spot on and so forth.

00:07:28.020 But but none of our group, we were just simply saying that, you know, the school didn't tell you the truth.

00:07:34.640 They defamed the dead.

00:07:36.220 They pretended that Christian missionaries in these schools, particularly Kamloops, were murderers.

00:07:42.160 That's all that's all it was about.

00:07:44.660 So the school was paranoid about that evacuated the school because it doesn't want kids to hear the other side.

00:07:50.560 And the goal of an educator is never, of course, to put any ideological pressure on children.

00:07:56.460 It's to get them to make up their own minds and think better.

00:08:00.980 Yeah.

00:08:01.460 So I guess that's why they would have to evacuate the children so they don't speak to you.

00:08:06.020 I mean, but they must have also if they sent you a letter saying that you were affecting the mental health of indigenous students,

00:08:11.020 they must have spoken to indigenous students that complained that you were affecting their mental health.

00:08:15.260 But the known indigenous what indigenous child on a Thursday night or Wednesday night is following a former teacher's X account.

00:08:24.820 Like how in the world?

00:08:27.040 I don't think the indigenous students had no idea I was there until it happened on Friday and they were told to leave their school.

00:08:33.860 So the important point here is that what they do in schools, what the left does, what the woke cult does is say it's about safety.

00:08:41.640 And schools, you know, have to be concerned about children's safety.

00:08:44.260 And but an obvious thing to say from fire and other external threats.

00:08:49.040 But what they're doing right now is none of those things.

00:08:52.280 Because we know that the term harm obviously gets extended.

00:08:56.820 The meaning of it gets extended.

00:08:58.180 So what do we even mean by harm?

00:08:59.700 But what they were doing by they want so badly for every child in Canada in school, including my in daycare, because my three year old grandson was told the other day that in First Nation children were forced were taken from their families and put in schools and had their hair cut. 0.56

00:09:15.840 And and and like three year old.

00:09:18.320 And so what they're doing is they're lying to kids, making it seem as though this is, again, this is traumatic experience visited upon every indigenous child, you know, because of teachers.

00:09:29.500 That's causing harm.

00:09:31.900 I did not cause any harm.

00:09:34.340 So what they're doing is they're they're perverting all this.

00:09:37.120 They're saying that they keep indigenous children and other students in the school free from the harm that my book that you held out represents.

00:09:46.800 They're keeping kids safe from ideas.

00:09:48.820 They're keeping kids safe from truth.

00:09:51.160 They're keeping kids safe from resilience, from knowing their past, from knowing their roots, from knowing,

00:09:56.900 knowing that men and women who came before and worked in these schools weren't monsters.

00:10:02.240 That's that's such a, you know, such again, a perversion of of language.

00:10:08.080 The idea that a former teacher holding up a book and across the street, nobody had to come anywhere near me.

00:10:14.200 And it was some older people like myself sitting on lawn chairs that the school need to be evacuated for.

00:10:20.380 That just shows you the authoritarian impulses.

00:10:23.460 And I think the fear, the fear is what they're doing in schools and after a few years in society, whether it's to do with race, whether it's to do with gender and whether it's to do with censoring literature and so forth.

00:10:35.820 They know they're wrong.

00:10:37.440 So they they're they're paranoid.

00:10:39.660 They're absolutely paranoid.

00:10:40.520 Yeah, because if I if I draw your attention to the election period, the at the English language debate or just after the English language debate, Rosemary Barton came out and, you know, had a spat with I think it was Rebel News stating that Rebel News reported asked an impolite question about residential schools and that bodies had been found all over all over the country.

00:11:06.940 I think she said, and they were forced to have to retract this comment, which was on a on a web page, but all the way down the page.

00:11:14.540 It wasn't even obvious when you looked at the web page, this correction stating that, in fact, no bodies had actually been found.

00:11:20.800 And you would think that this would make waves across the country.

00:11:26.480 And and yet you your book saying the same thing is met with accusations of harming students.

00:11:34.980 Yeah, it's really quite extraordinary.

00:11:38.060 So Canada was true to in particular ran with this this, you know, social panic so he could virtue signal and pretend he was in a moral high ground, because unlike everybody else, he knows about all these murdered children.

00:11:52.160 And and and the fact that you have someone as important as Rosemary Barton believing in this fiction is really worrisome about Canada and the person who posed the question from Rebel News was Drea Humphrey, who is who is part black and part indigenous.

00:12:09.160 So so so the woke are not only scoffing at old white men like me and calling me denialists and racist and and and again, I haven't taught in four years and never teach again.

00:12:20.540 So they destroyed me. And all I can do is is, you know, defend myself, don't work again, but I'm going to set the record straight.

00:12:29.900 So they don't ever want to engage in any of this because what they say about children being in the wrong body or what they say about To Kill a Mockingbird, the latest book to be banned where where I live, you know, this is just about, you know, indigenous issues.

00:12:44.860 It's about speech. I mean, ultimately, the way that I look at it is beyond the question of the residential schools.

00:12:51.580 I mean, it really is a question of speech. And is true speech allowed in this country?

00:12:58.100 So there's something to be said about opinions. You know, maybe somebody's opinions is hate speech and there can be a conversation around that.

00:13:04.820 But when we're talking about true speech, that being considered something that needs to be censored because it's not following a particular narrative.

00:13:13.460 That's what I see in this particular case. I see it with your story.

00:13:17.180 And we especially saw that with the children being evacuated from your previous school after we were fired for saying that their children were probably not murdered.

00:13:26.160 Right. And so but but speech is allowed on on if you have a particular political leaning, let's say a left leaning, you're allowed to engage in speech and call things banning and so on and so forth.

00:13:37.120 But if you're considering or if it's a right coded, even even if you're not on the right, but if it's coded to the right, then it must be censored.

00:13:43.160 And and it's not called a ban. It's just sense. It's just hate speech. Right.

00:13:48.020 And I worry about what what that will do. So I'm very glad to see people like you not giving up.

00:13:54.700 And a few years later, it looks like you're being vindicated with this story.

00:13:59.100 You know, the CBC having to admit that, in fact, there are no bodies that they found.

00:14:02.860 Yeah, I I ran out of copies of my book.

00:14:05.740 I've got to reprint hundreds more.

00:14:08.480 I I I I people are are becoming aware that they're not getting the goods from mainstream media.

00:14:16.020 Do you know, I would go further than what you said, Melanie, and say it's not about having the right to speak truly in schools, because who defines what truth is?

00:14:27.400 You know, as Dalai Lama once said that the truth is like a diamond.

00:14:30.960 Each side or facet is is one part of the truth.

00:14:34.960 I think it's silencing any debate in a school or university or in a democratic society is in Nicholas.

00:14:41.460 And that's what they did to me again in my old school.

00:14:45.120 I hadn't gone back in four years.

00:14:46.320 I'm no threat to anybody.

00:14:47.340 I'm not harassing anybody.

00:14:48.780 I didn't go toward anybody.

00:14:50.940 The police said, don't you just said things they don't like.

00:14:53.280 I'm not.

00:14:54.120 I wasn't even speaking.

00:14:55.500 I was just, you know, smiling and chatting with people on the other side of the street.

00:14:59.940 But with my books, the thing that's so extraordinary right now is, as you said, this is about speech.

00:15:06.960 It's not about right or wrong.

00:15:08.600 It's about the fact that there are people who think they can control everybody's speech.

00:15:13.460 That's 1984 again.

00:15:14.940 That's Big Brother.

00:15:15.960 That's the idea of having television screens in every room watching you all the time.

00:15:21.020 I had 105 new allegations against me on Friday.

00:15:24.860 The same day I'm doing my book launch, I get a letter.

00:15:29.420 I'm sorry, I get news from my lawyer, the 105 new allegations because of my social media posts.

00:15:35.460 I haven't been in a school for four years as a teacher.

00:15:40.160 So it has nothing to do with my teaching.

00:15:42.060 It has nothing to do with my dismissal.

00:15:43.760 This is, as you said, this is just about you need to be on script.

00:15:48.740 But that is, that's a totalitarian society.

00:15:51.700 That's not the candidate that I'm ever going to accept.

00:15:54.260 And that's why those people, they threaten me and they offer me money from time to time.

00:15:59.820 They do everything they can to induce me to give up.

00:16:03.720 And they don't know how to deal with me because I'm not going away.

00:16:07.760 And there is going to be a day soon that every single Canadian is going to know that there was no, there are no murdered children.

00:16:15.080 There are no missing Indigenous children at those schools.

00:16:17.720 There never was any unmarked grave.

00:16:20.680 There is never any, was ever a parent looking for a missing child.

00:16:24.760 All that's, that's untrue and that residential schools were overall a very good thing, far better than no education for kids who were illiterate and enumerate 100 or 150 years ago.

00:16:38.280 Try making it in the modern world without an education.

00:16:42.180 Yeah, well, we see, you know, certain Canadians being targeted.

00:16:45.640 It seems to me to be, to make an example of another example that is the parent and parent council member, Catherine Cronos, who recently declined to do a land acknowledgement and has been in the news for being suspended from her parent council for refusing to do a land acknowledgement.

00:17:03.000 So that's a whole story.

00:17:03.820 But that, you know, this targeting of individuals is almost like to make an example of them, like you must toe the line.

00:17:09.300 And so, yeah, I feel like you're one of those individuals that, that, that is targeted for that particular reason.

00:17:15.800 But I just want to pivot just slightly to close off the episode, because there's a little tidbit of information that people might not know about you.

00:17:22.600 And that is your connection to our current prime minister.

00:17:26.300 So Mark Carney's father, Robert Carney, was your PhD supervisor.

00:17:33.640 Right.

00:17:34.200 He was my, yes, he was my supervisor at the University of Alberta.

00:17:38.580 For my master's, I did a PhD at the University of Toronto.

00:17:42.680 He was, he was as remarkable a man as I ever saw in an academic institution.

00:17:49.980 And what he said while I did my thesis, which really, you know, he really helped me.

00:17:56.080 He said to me, well, why don't you do what I'm doing?

00:17:59.040 His particular interest was indigenous education and how to make it better.

00:18:03.080 Because the problem in indigenous education wasn't murdering priests or nuns with guns.

00:18:08.180 The problem was that the kids didn't stay in school.

00:18:10.800 So they were provided school, day, day schools or regular schools or residential schools, but they didn't stay.

00:18:16.740 Many of them only lasted a year or two.

00:18:18.600 So he had asked me to work with him to try and see how it could be made better.

00:18:22.920 And this was in the 1980s.

00:18:24.720 And then years later, his son becomes prime minister.

00:18:29.120 And he's asked about this.

00:18:30.180 He knows his whole father never once said residential schools were bad because that didn't make any sense.

00:18:36.580 It was all about providing education.

00:18:39.420 How do you provide education to kids who live in a nomadic band of 50 in the Arctic?

00:18:45.140 How do you do that without bringing them somewhere to go to school?

00:18:47.760 So Robert Carney and I never talked about whether the schools were good or bad.

00:18:52.740 That just seems so superficial.

00:18:54.880 It was about how to make them better and serve indigenous children.

00:18:58.360 And so what does Mark Carney do?

00:19:00.320 He says, I love my father, but I don't agree with those views.

00:19:04.480 Well, what do you not agree with?

00:19:06.180 Everything Robert, he was the leading expert in Canadian history on educating indigenous children, native children.

00:19:14.060 The idea that the prime minister just sweeps all his father's work with.

00:19:18.500 My father was the chief justice of Ontario and a politician and a diplomat and all sorts of things.

00:19:24.900 And you know what?

00:19:26.700 Right or wrong, I'd always stand by my father.

00:19:29.460 So I found that peculiar.

00:19:30.800 But secondly, Robert Carney was a better man than his son to do that to Robert Carney.

00:19:38.460 This was a man that should be read, not dismissed for those views.

00:19:43.080 Well, I mean, we can always hope that maybe he felt pressured or Mark Carney felt pressured to say something, to appeal to the ideologues for a particular reason.

00:19:52.920 But presumably he does understand his father's legacy and work.

00:19:56.140 And, you know, there may be some hope that perhaps this narrative will shift in this country.

00:20:01.000 Can I answer that?

00:20:01.980 Just jump in for a second and say, of course, Mark Carney knows.

00:20:06.240 Mark Carney is a smart guy and I'm sure he's a good man.

00:20:09.580 I know he's a good man.

00:20:10.580 So what he's doing is he's doing what most woke people do.

00:20:14.240 Most of our institutional leaders do.

00:20:16.360 They know everything they represent is false.

00:20:20.120 But it's not about content or truth or history.

00:20:24.620 It's not about any of those things.

00:20:26.620 It's about how they can get ahead, how Mark Carney can get elected.

00:20:31.100 Again, this is the sad thing about it, that we as a country are all useful idiots for the people at the top of our institutions.

00:20:38.440 Yeah, well, we can only hope.

00:20:41.620 We can only hope.

00:20:43.460 Thank you for joining me today, Jim.

00:20:45.200 It's been a fantastic conversation.

00:20:47.420 It's a pleasure.

00:20:48.520 Thank you, Melanie.

00:20:49.820 And that's it.

00:20:50.460 That's our episode for today.

00:20:52.040 I hope you enjoyed it.

00:20:53.160 If you did, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel.

00:20:57.480 For True North, I'm Melanie Bennett.

00:20:59.060 Thank you.

Juno News - June 13, 2025

Book bans, mass graves, and the war on truth in Canadian schools

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