Juno News - July 06, 2021


Churches burned on Canada Day long weekend, and the media is partially to blame.

Topics
church burnings
Mentioned
Sophie Pierre Cowessus Nikki Ashton Indian Band Mark Twain Pol Pot McCullough Auschwitz Hitler Stalin Sikh
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Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

163.68

Word count

2,254

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Churches were burned on Canada Day long weekend, and the media is partially to blame. We re witnessing a moral panic in this country over revelations of the alleged discovery of graves at former residential schools across Western Canada. This panic came to a breaking point over the weekend when prominent statues were knocked down and at least 25 churches in Western Canada were either vandalized or completely burnt down. To make matters worse, several prominent commentators, including politicians, journalists, professors, and lawyers, excused the behavior of the mob, and even cheered them on.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.040 Churches burned on Canada Day-Long Weekend, and the media is partially to blame.
00:00:04.580 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:11.700 We're witnessing a moral panic in this country over revelations of the alleged discovery of graves
00:00:17.280 at former residential schools across Western Canada.
00:00:20.360 This panic came to a breaking point over the weekend when prominent statues were knocked down
00:00:25.780 and at least 25 churches in Western Canada were either vandalized or completely burnt down.
00:00:32.580 To make the matters worse, several prominent commentators, including politicians, journalists, professors, lawyers, and activists,
00:00:39.880 excused the behavior of the mob.
00:00:42.000 They explained away and justified these riots, and in some cases, they even cheered them on.
00:00:47.460 Burn it all down, said the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association,
00:00:51.180 once the country's strongest voice for protecting the rule of law and civil liberties.
00:00:56.880 Likewise, the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association branch said,
00:01:01.340 burn it all down.
00:01:02.740 Or how about this, from a radio host in St. John, New Brunswick. 0.98
00:01:06.700 Burn the churches down.
00:01:08.540 Arrest any staff that were actually there and any current staff that won't provide documentation. 0.95
00:01:14.000 Sell everything they own in Canada and give it to survivors. 0.97
00:01:18.040 Dismantle it completely.
00:01:19.160 And finally, not to be outdone, NDP MP Nikki Ashton cheered on the mob who toppled down statues
00:01:26.900 at the Manitoba legislature, calling it decolonization and saying,
00:01:32.000 no pride in genocide.
00:01:33.780 This kind of reckless language would be universally condemned if, say,
00:01:38.080 it were right-wing commentators talking about, well, anything.
00:01:41.700 It probably would be considered hate speech.
00:01:44.160 These accounts would be banned from social media platforms,
00:01:46.300 and the individuals behind them would probably have police officers knocking at their doors.
00:01:51.480 Likewise, it doesn't even need to be said, but if instead of churches,
00:01:55.040 these were synagogues, mosques, Sikh temples, or any other sacred space,
00:01:59.720 it goes without saying that every politician in this country would be urgently condemning it.
00:02:04.980 There would be candlelit vigils across the country,
00:02:06.980 and the RCMP would have launched a nationwide manhunt for those responsible.
00:02:12.060 It would be the top ongoing story in the country.
00:02:15.640 Instead, there's this sort of feeling that the church burnings are somehow justified,
00:02:19.540 that this violence is only to be expected,
00:02:21.880 and that this is all somehow a legitimate reckoning for our historical and collective sins.
00:02:26.840 So how did we get here?
00:02:29.140 How did we get to this point of extreme tension, anger, and violence in our country?
00:02:34.060 Well, it's been six weeks now since the allegation was first made
00:02:37.620 by the chief of the T'Kemloops Band in Kamloops, British Columbia,
00:02:40.660 who claimed to have discovered 215 unmarked graves
00:02:44.280 belonging to children who attended the residential school there.
00:02:47.840 Since that time, two other bands have come forward with similar allegations,
00:02:51.580 751 graves found in Cowessess, Saskatchewan,
00:02:56.200 and another 182 in Lower Kootenay, B.C.
00:03:00.020 Over these past six weeks, the story has evolved.
00:03:03.240 New facts have been uncovered,
00:03:04.820 and we've gotten a clearer picture of what exactly happened in these communities
00:03:07.920 and what exactly was uncovered.
00:03:10.800 But regardless of these new facts,
00:03:13.260 the media has allowed the narrative to get away from the truth.
00:03:17.260 Sensational headlines exaggerating the story
00:03:19.500 led some to truly believe that these graves were evidence of mass murder,
00:03:24.680 death camps, genocide, and of a legitimate holocaust in Canada. 0.64
00:03:29.080 So let's take some time today to look at those facts
00:03:32.360 and to dissect the many ways that the media has gotten the story so wrong,
00:03:37.160 which has led us to this place.
00:03:39.680 Okay, first things first.
00:03:41.020 It's important to note that the story at this point is merely an allegation.
00:03:45.320 Nothing has been proven.
00:03:46.180 In fact, no evidence has been put forth for public consideration.
00:03:50.940 No reports have been released.
00:03:52.880 Every news story thus far has merely been based off of the claims made by band leaders
00:03:57.780 from these three bands.
00:03:59.760 This may be a minor point, but it's still an important distinction.
00:04:03.040 The typical standard in the media would be to clarify that these allegations have not yet been proven.
00:04:08.860 Second point.
00:04:10.040 There has been incredible confusion over what exactly was discovered here.
00:04:13.720 My friend JJ McCullough has made the same point on Twitter,
00:04:16.940 showing all the various ways that the media have described this discovery.
00:04:21.540 Let me just read a few.
00:04:22.660 So according to NPR, they said that the remains of 215 children have been found in a mass grave.
00:04:28.980 CTV wrote that the 215 children were recently uncovered.
00:04:34.000 Canadian press said that the unmarked burial site believed to contain the remains of 215 children.
00:04:40.560 CBC said that the remains of 215 children could be buried at the site.
00:04:46.940 Global News said that the remains of 215 children were discovered in an unmarked burial.
00:04:52.900 And another story in the CBC said that the band announced the search had confirmed the presence of the remains of 215 children.
00:05:00.480 So you can see the variation here.
00:05:02.700 The First Nations band leader said that they used ground penetrating radar.
00:05:06.860 So there was no excavation.
00:05:08.600 Nothing was on earth.
00:05:09.800 Nothing was uncovered.
00:05:11.120 There were no bodies found and no identities confirmed.
00:05:14.560 So let me refer back to a National Post story that I've talked about before on the show.
00:05:18.700 And it explains what ground penetrating radar actually does.
00:05:22.280 So for this report, they interviewed a professor of anthropology, who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology.
00:05:31.980 She said this of ground penetrating radar, quote,
00:05:34.700 It doesn't actually see the bodies.
00:05:37.040 It's not like an x-ray.
00:05:38.460 What it actually does is look for the shaft.
00:05:40.860 When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug, and the body is placed in the grave, sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context.
00:05:49.140 What the ground penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave.
00:05:56.940 And occasionally, if it is a coffin, the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well, unquote.
00:06:02.380 So this technology is not completely accurate, and it doesn't tell us anything about who is buried.
00:06:09.320 So this brings me to my third point about what the media has been getting wrong, and that is whose graves were actually discovered.
00:06:15.740 The first band in Kamloops claimed that the graves belonged to children at the former residential school.
00:06:21.900 So when the second two bands came forth with their claims, many in the media just sort of conflated all the information
00:06:28.120 and said that these graves, too, were from children at residential school.
00:06:32.960 But that's not what the claim is.
00:06:34.360 In fact, in both the cases of the Cowessus and the Lower Kootenay, the graves were believed to be community cemeteries belonging to both First Nations and the broader Canadian community.
00:06:46.000 So this is tucked away at the very end of a report in the Globe and Mail on the findings of that Cowessus reserve in Saskatchewan.
00:06:52.620 It says this, it appears that not all the graves contain children's body, Lorette said.
00:06:57.760 Lorette is one of the band leaders.
00:07:00.120 He said the area was also used as a burial site by the rural municipality.
00:07:05.280 We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today and notified us that some of those unmarked graves had their families in them, their loved ones, he said.
00:07:13.320 So what we have here is an abandoned community cemetery where people of different backgrounds were buried.
00:07:20.260 So that's quite the leap from the original storyline, which were that these graves all belong to children who died at the residential school.
00:07:27.440 And this brings me to my next point.
00:07:29.700 Fourth, these are not mass graves.
00:07:31.960 So we saw this right off the bat.
00:07:34.200 Several media outlets, both in Canada and international outlets like BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, all erroneously labeled these findings as mass graves.
00:07:45.900 This is incredibly irresponsible.
00:07:48.160 The chiefs themselves explicitly stated that these are not mass graves.
00:07:52.600 This is not a mass grave site.
00:07:56.560 These are unmarked graves.
00:07:59.860 So why is this important?
00:08:00.880 Well, mass graves are a hallmark of genocide.
00:08:04.120 They conjure images of pure evil, the kind of evil that characterize the collective governments of the 20th century, governments like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. 0.54
00:08:14.760 These are truly evil leaders who use mass graves to cover their atrocities and crimes against humanity.
00:08:21.340 These leaders carried out mass murder and the mass graves went hand in hand.
00:08:25.360 So using this term mass graves is wrong.
00:08:29.300 And it's also reckless because it conflates Canada's policy, which was forced assimilation through mandatory universal education.
00:08:37.720 It conflates that with actual Nazi death camps.
00:08:41.160 Now, we should be clear.
00:08:42.580 Canada's policy was wrong.
00:08:44.320 It was misguided.
00:08:45.140 And in too many cases, those who were responsible for caring for children in this country, let them down and they let the whole country down.
00:08:52.740 But that doesn't put Canada's residential schools on any sort of equivalence with Auschwitz and actual Nazi concentration camps.
00:09:00.600 And that brings me to my fifth point, which is also connected, which is the cause of death.
00:09:05.040 So many of the children who died at these schools died of natural causes.
00:09:07.960 According to the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015, the number one cause of death for children at these schools was tuberculosis.
00:09:15.720 The number two cause of death was influenza.
00:09:18.740 Now, you can argue that these children didn't receive proper health care and that some of their immune systems simply couldn't handle living in close proximity to other children.
00:09:26.120 But negligence resulting in accidental death is very different from firing squads and gas chambers.
00:09:33.500 And yet there was this weird universal assumption in the media that the discovery of these graves was somehow evidence of Canada's Holocaust and that these children had been deliberately killed in some kind of a genocide.
00:09:46.760 Look, genocide requires intent.
00:09:49.040 It requires a concerted and systematic effort to conduct mass murder and eliminate an entire race of people. 0.93
00:09:56.120 Canada's residential schools, however misguided, had the intent of educating children, of assimilating them into the broader Canadian population, and ultimately of lifting children out of poverty.
00:10:06.760 The policy was wrong, clearly.
00:10:08.600 It was flawed and it resulted in much harm.
00:10:11.440 But there are a few orders of magnitude that separate the misguided intent of Catholic priests, nuns, and Canadian government officials versus those of Nazi soldiers in the Second World War.
00:10:23.220 Next, the sixth point where the media gets this story completely wrong.
00:10:28.300 It's possible that the graves that we're talking about are not even necessarily unmarked graves.
00:10:34.080 Did you see this story in global news over the weekend?
00:10:37.480 The headline reads,
00:10:38.920 We knew it was there.
00:10:39.940 Former BC chief says unmarked graves near Cranbrook need more context.
00:10:44.320 And I'm going to read this story almost in its entirety because it's so remarkable.
00:10:49.980 So it says,
00:11:19.980 Sophie Pierre, former chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band and survivor of the school itself.
00:11:27.680 Notice how they use the term survivor.
00:11:29.440 Again, this is supposed to conjure images of Holocaust survivors.
00:11:33.000 And they just, you know, also use it here to describe people who went to a school.
00:11:36.540 But it says a survivor of the school told Global News that while the news of the unmarked graves had a painful impact on her and surrounding communities, they had always known the graves were there.
00:11:47.540 There's no discovery.
00:11:48.540 There's no discovery.
00:11:49.620 We knew it was there.
00:11:50.740 It's a graveyard, Pierre said.
00:11:52.840 The fact that there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
00:11:58.140 According to Pierre, wooden crosses that originally marked the grave sites had been burned or deteriorated over the years.
00:12:05.000 Using a wooden marker at a grave site remains a practice that continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada.
00:12:12.320 So when we're talking about these so-called unmarked graves, what we're more likely talking about is abandoned cemeteries.
00:12:20.100 Abandoned cemeteries where people of different backgrounds, not just children from residential schools, and not just First Nations people were buried.
00:12:26.840 We should obviously make an effort to address this problem and make sure that graves and cemeteries are cared for.
00:12:33.280 But what an amazing leap of logic to go from an uncared community cemetery to mass graves, mass murder, and genocide.
00:12:43.580 Mark Twain once said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
00:12:47.300 Well, for many journalists, it seems, they never let facts get in the way of a good narrative. 0.92
00:12:51.700 And that narrative is that Canada is an evil white supremacist nation that committed genocide against its First Nations people.
00:12:59.720 It's not true, but that is the narrative that they are pushing.
00:13:03.200 So is it any wonder then that some out there are so angered by this news that they've reacted with violence and rioting?
00:13:10.260 Or is it any wonder that a radical faction of the far left are using this crisis as an opportunity to wreak havoc, tear down our history, tear down all the statues, and burn down the churches that they hate so much?
00:13:23.160 Of course, these violent criminals who are burning down churches are the ones who are to blame for their own actions.
00:13:28.580 But the media are also partially to blame for raising the temperature, for pushing a hysterical narrative that in no way represents the facts of this story, and for wrongly and recklessly accusing Canada of unspeakable crimes like genocide.
00:13:44.020 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.