Juno News - How Canada got the residential school story wrong

00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. It is so great to be with you today

00:00:07.320 and we're announcing some exciting special news here at Juno News. So one of the things that we

00:00:12.500 do is publish journalism, try to tell the other side of the story and try to keep Canadians

00:00:16.860 informed as to the important things that are happening in our country, oftentimes stories

00:00:21.200 that the legacy media ignores and neglects or just straight up tells wrong, spins and doesn't

00:00:27.720 give you the full picture. One of the other things that we try to do, though, is publish books. Find

00:00:32.820 authors and talented writers in Canada who have something to say, have, you know, another side of

00:00:39.320 an interesting story. Probably the most important thing we've done in recent years is publish the

00:00:43.980 book Grave Error, written by Professor Tom Flanagan and C.P. Champion to, again, tell the other side

00:00:50.500 of the story when it came to the unmarked graves moral panic of 2021 and set the record straight,

00:00:56.820 give the facts, tell people the story behind, you know, the totally spun and over the top

00:01:07.020 ridiculous propaganda pushed you by the legacy media. We're very pleased today to announce that

00:01:11.280 we are publishing a sequel to that book. The book is called Dead Wrong, How Canada Got the Residential 0.50

00:01:16.980 School Story So Wrong. And I'm very pleased today to be joined by one of the authors, again, Dr. Tom

00:01:23.240 Flanagan. So you know Tom very well here on the Candace Malcolm Show. He's a professor emeritus at

00:01:28.040 the University of Calgary School of Public Policies, an award-winning author specializing in politics and

00:01:32.620 indigenous issues. He was Stephen Harper's campaign manager way back in the day in 2004-2006. And of

00:01:39.260 course, he is the co-author of Grave Error, which came out in 2023. So Tom, welcome to the program.

00:01:44.820 Great to have you.

00:01:46.140 Yeah, well, thanks for having me.

00:01:47.520 So, you know, I really think that publishing Grave Error was one of the most important things

00:01:51.600 that True North ever did. And, you know, I've had you on the show several times to talk about that

00:01:56.580 story and how it came to publish it. You know, if you haven't read that book already, I encourage you

00:02:01.240 to go out and read it. But today, available on Amazon and also at JunoNews.com, you can go and pick

00:02:07.340 up the sequel, which is called Dead Wrong. And I encourage everyone to go do that. It makes a great

00:02:11.780 holiday gift here. So Tom, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the book and why you decided to

00:02:16.740 write a second one?

00:02:18.500 Yeah. Well, first of all, Candice, let me make one technical correction. I'm not the author.

00:02:23.820 I'm the co-editor. The book consists of contributions by about 18 quite talented researchers and authors.

00:02:32.540 So Chris Champion and I are the editors. And that was also true of Grave Error.

00:02:36.220 So I don't want to take more credit than is due. It's a team effort. And that's what makes it so

00:02:43.680 so persuasive, I think, is that we bring together so much expertise. As to why we did this second

00:02:51.480 book, well, Grave Error appeared in December of 2023. And the story goes on. Things have happened

00:03:00.660 since then. So we wanted to cover the progress of the story of what I call the Kamloops narrative

00:03:07.340 since December of 2023. And there have been some important developments. For example,

00:03:14.080 the release of the pseudo-documentary Sugarcane, which was nominated for an Oscar. It didn't win,

00:03:21.600 thank God, but still got enormous publicity in spite of containing dozens of historical efforts.

00:03:27.840 And it takes off from the alleged discovery of 215 children's bodies at Kamloops, which of course

00:03:37.080 was a false announcement. That's just one example. But there have been other stories. There have been

00:03:43.940 other alleged discoveries at other places. There have been travesties of justice. For example,

00:03:52.900 the firing of Jim McMurtry as a high school teacher at Abbotsford, because he told students

00:03:59.320 the absolute truth, which is that most students who died at residential schools died of tuberculosis,

00:04:05.840 and they weren't murdered. And he was fired for that. Never has obtained justice yet, still trying.

00:04:13.620 The B.C. Law Society tried to impose the Kamloops narrative in its educational materials. Finally was

00:04:22.260 forced to back down by the relentless opposition of lawyer Jim Heller. But it took years, and they

00:04:29.460 threatened him with a libel suit in the process. I could go on and on. But a lot of the Kamloops

00:04:41.060 narrative has become now a fixture of Canadian political discussion, even though the Kamloops

00:04:49.380 band have basically admitted that it's unsubstantiated. Two years later, they put out a revised statement

00:04:57.540 saying that what they found with their ground-penetrating radar were soil anomalies, not bodies.

00:05:04.660 I guess better late than never. But in the meantime, the story has become so fixed in the Canadian

00:05:11.540 imagination that most of the media, legacy media, with the one exception of the National Post, but

00:05:18.900 other than that, the legacy media continue to write as if that story is true. I mean, it's unbelievable,

00:05:26.980 really, that the original proponents don't even believe it. But it's become one of these things

00:05:33.700 that's, you know, truer than true, sort of beyond evidence. Anyway, we keep trying to provide evidence

00:05:41.540 about that and related issues.

00:05:43.300 Well, it really is one of those things that the facts of the story almost don't matter to many

00:05:49.700 Canadians because the narrative has been so powerful in telling this story. And one of the

00:05:55.780 important things that Grave Error did was talk about the historical fact of what residential

00:06:01.460 schools really were, what they were really like. Interesting. I learned from that book that,

00:06:05.940 I mean, basically the way that the story, the history of the residential schools was taught and

00:06:10.900 how Canadians understood it prior to like the 1990s was that it was a force for good, right? We were

00:06:16.420 trying to educate people and integrate them into the modern economy and give them opportunities and

00:06:22.020 skills. Usually when you think of educating impoverished people and ensuring quality

00:06:28.100 education to people, it's thought of as a good thing, a public good. But suddenly the idea of

00:06:33.140 residential schools became that they were genocidal. And, you know, whether or not there's any evidence

00:06:37.460 to that, it almost doesn't matter because that's what the media tell people. That's what's taught in

00:06:42.420 schools. One of the important stories that you detail, one of the chapters that you did write in Dead

00:06:49.380 Wrong is about what happened in Quesnel. And so I'm wondering if you could sort of

00:06:54.340 retell the story of the Quesnel saga to the audience here. Yeah, talk about a farce.

00:07:01.300 The wife of the mayor of Quesnel bought 10 copies of Grave Error. I mean, this is an author's dream,

00:07:08.580 right? She buys 10 copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. And the book got passed around

00:07:16.580 and the local native community rose up against her and her husband. And they flooded a city council

00:07:26.180 meeting and protested against her distributing the book. At that point, I don't think anybody had

00:07:31.700 actually read the book except possibly the mayor's wife. So anyway, what they were trying to get the

00:07:41.060 mayor to resign because of his wife's taste in reading. Good on him, he refused to resign.

00:07:49.220 And he eventually won a case in court over that. And now his wife is suing, I'm not exactly sure,

00:07:56.660 some First Nations group for libel, I believe. So the drama continues and with no end to it yet.

00:08:05.700 But how ridiculous can you get protesting about distributing a few copies of a book before people

00:08:13.700 even get a chance to read it? So anyway, there's a chapter in the book about that.

00:08:23.780 So that's one of the many things that happened. British Columbia has been the worst,

00:08:27.940 probably because Kamloops in British Columbia is in British Columbia. And so the narrative radiated

00:08:34.420 out from Kamloops. And Cornell is well, it's not right next to it, but it's 200 or 300 miles away.

00:08:43.860 So that's one example of the craziness that we've seen. Now, from the editor's point of view,

00:08:52.180 it was wonderful. Grave Error, because of the publicity, Grave Error jumped up for about three

00:08:58.340 weeks. It was on the top of the bestseller list in Amazon of all books. You know, not just history

00:09:05.700 books or indigenous books. I mean, it was selling more than celebrity autobiographies or children's

00:09:13.620 books or any kind of book due to the publicity from Cornell. I mean, it's a bestseller in any case,

00:09:20.980 but jumping to the top, number one is almost unheard of for a book of that

00:09:26.100 type with 800 footnotes. Well, that's a good point, right? It's an academic book. It's mostly

00:09:32.980 written by professors, scholars. A couple of journalists have essays in there as well. It's a

00:09:38.020 dense read, right? It's not just, you know, something could be provocative. No, it's not easy reading.

00:09:44.180 It's a scholarly book. It gives historic accounts and it's really there to provide some substance

00:09:50.420 to the claims that we hear so often. And it's interesting the way that the media treat it,

00:09:54.420 right? Like, I think that a big part of the reason it became such a popular bestseller at

00:09:58.180 that point was because the CBC were writing hit pieces about it, calling you a denialist or a denier

00:10:04.900 or whatever, and basically just saying that the book itself was just so, it was like, it was so

00:10:10.740 outrageous that someone would dare question this media narrative that had been created.

00:10:16.740 The reality, again, is it's just bringing facts. And I should note that at the recent count, Tom,

00:10:22.260 the book has sold over 25,000 copies, right? I think it was you that noted that to become an academic

00:10:27.300 bestseller in Canada, you have to sell something like 500 copies. So we're like orders of magnitudes

00:10:32.340 more. And, you know, the most important thing is that Canadians are just interested in the truth.

00:10:37.940 They've heard this narrative. They've received the browbeating. I was having this conversation with my

00:10:42.500 parents the other day about how a majority of young people now believe that Canada is an

00:10:47.140 illegitimate country, that the residential schools were genocidal in nature, you know, 0.70

00:10:52.100 not just not just assimilation or, you know, the term that they use cultural genocide, which doesn't

00:10:56.980 really mean anything, but they were literal genocide, like they were killing camps, which is just so

00:11:01.060 patently absurd that we need to set the record straight. And I think there's a thirst for it.

00:11:05.140 25,000 doesn't even begin to say how many people have read the book, because we know that libraries across the

00:11:10.980 country had, you know, year long wait lists, there was, I think, 152 people in a waiting list in

00:11:16.740 Calgary to read the book at the library. So certainly been read, you know, far wide. And I think that

00:11:23.300 there is really an appetite for this. But, you know, speaking of British Columbia, you say that that's

00:11:28.580 sort of where things went the most crazy. I think a lot of people are concerned and interested in this

00:11:33.540 BC Supreme Court case. So while I have you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Of course, back in August,

00:11:38.740 the BC Supreme Court recognized Aboriginal title over a large part of land in Richmond,

00:11:44.420 British Columbia, based on historic fishing rights for the Cowichan tribe, the Cowichan tribe,

00:11:50.340 which is located, you know, some 100 miles away on Vancouver Island. So what do you make of that?

00:11:55.380 I know that there was recently an update of the story, which is that homeowners were warned that

00:11:58.820 their private property may be in doubt due to this warning. So sorry, due to this court ruling. So they

00:12:04.820 received letters from the city of Richmond basically just informing them that the property is located

00:12:11.060 within the claim area, and that it will have serious implications for their actual title and

00:12:18.660 their land that they own, which is quite terrifying. What do you make of this whole thing, Tom?

00:12:25.780 Well, I'm glad I don't live in British Columbia.

00:12:27.940 The political climate out there is bonkers. I have a good friend who wanted to retire to British

00:12:35.940 Columbia, but he moved back to Alberta. He said he couldn't stay out of the politics.

00:12:39.620 Thanks. This is surprising, but not really.

00:12:50.020 The it's what it is, is the logical outcome of a series of cases. Oh, going back years and years back to

00:13:01.860 the actually to the 1960s. It's been a salami tactics, a step at a time has gradually broadened

00:13:11.780 the conception of Aboriginal title and it got a huge boost when the constitutional amendments of 1982

00:13:20.500 were adopted and section 35 of the act specifies that treaty and Aboriginal rights are now part of the

00:13:28.500 constitution. Well, there was a qualifier in their existing, but the courts haven't paid any attention

00:13:35.460 to that. They've continually amplified the definition. So this is one more step in the amplification which

00:13:44.900 has been going on. The BC government didn't put up a very good case at trial. Now they claim they're

00:13:54.260 going to appeal and I mean, they will appeal, but will it be for show? I don't know how seriously they

00:14:00.740 will fight against it. The decision could be overturned or adjusted on appeal. There are some weak points,

00:14:13.940 some historical weak points, and this will go on for several years. I'm sure it will go to the Supreme

00:14:21.060 Court of Canada in the end. So we'll have to wait and see what the full impact is. But regardless of

00:14:28.420 what happens in this particular case, it's an index of the of the general trend in British Columbia.

00:14:35.380 And we see now other claims being filed with similar logic. There's one in Coquitlam just this week or

00:14:42.980 last week that was in the news. So I think it's and it's not just in British Columbia. You've got

00:14:51.540 parallel cases in Nova Scotia, Quebec, parts of Ontario, anywhere where the treaty where there weren't

00:15:02.820 explicit land surrender treaties or where there's some ambiguity about it. You're going to have these claims.

00:15:10.180 So that means most of Quebec, New Brunswick, a few parts of Ontario. The prairies, I think,

00:15:17.940 are probably in the clear for now until the Supreme Court comes up with some new doctrine that

00:15:25.140 overturns treaties. And I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility. But basically, if there's been an

00:15:33.780 explicit land surrender treaty, as is true for the prairies and most of Ontario and bits of British

00:15:42.420 Columbia, you're probably in the clear for now with your private title, and you don't have to worry

00:15:48.020 about it. But if there is no explicit land surrender treaty, yeah, you know, I have friends who wanted to

00:15:55.700 retire to British Columbia, other friends, not the one I mentioned, the friends who want to retire there.

00:16:00.500 And wow, they've been gobsmacked by this. You know, I've been shipping them as much advice as I can

00:16:06.900 find. But it really is, it's uncertain. I guess that's the bad part of it. You don't know. It's the

00:16:14.660 uncertainty. And of course, lenders don't want to venture into cases where title is uncertain.

00:16:21.700 So there's been rumors of people having trouble renewing mortgages in, in Richmond, I don't know

00:16:29.300 if these are actually factual or not, I haven't seen a factually documented case. So maybe it's more

00:16:34.900 rumor at the moment, maybe it's more rumor, but it is certainly something that that that could happen.

00:16:40.340 And the college and nations have said that they're not interested in taking over anybody's private title.

00:16:49.380 And that's nice to hear. But the fact is that according to this judgment, they could,

00:16:55.460 you know, even if they say they won't do it now. Legally, they could if this judgment stands and

00:17:02.260 how you know, who's going to give you a mortgage on that basis? Well, it's very disturbing.

00:17:08.180 It's also the precedent that it sets. I mean, there's some 200 different tribes in British Columbia,

00:17:12.980 they don't have treaties out there. And so they all have land claims all over.

00:17:16.980 There's four or five different tribes that claim Vancouver itself. My whole family still lives out 0.95

00:17:22.660 there and they are paying attention to this, but they don't seem to think it's as big of a deal.

00:17:27.060 But I think you could draw a straight line from the 2021 announcement, false announcement of 215

00:17:33.540 unmarked graves discovered at an Indian residential school, turned out to not be true at all, never been

00:17:38.500 substantiated, to, you know, these latest iterations of Canadians just going out of their way to try to

00:17:45.700 rectify for some historic wrongs that may or may not have actually occurred. You and Mark Milkey had a

00:17:52.100 really interesting piece in the National Post published a couple days ago on, I think it might

00:17:58.020 be occurring in print yesterday or today. And it says Canada wasn't stolen from Indigenous people.

00:18:04.660 It was built on land that was received from Indigenous in exchange for benefits that continue 0.99

00:18:08.900 today. False notions mustn't vulcanize us. You do a really deep dive where you go back 25,000 years to

00:18:15.620 talk about histories of migration and the origin of the homo sapiens species, to talk about the different

00:18:23.220 waves of migration that continued right up until the time Christopher Columbus came. There are

00:18:28.660 disputes as to who is here at what point, but particularly you say this notion that you often

00:18:35.220 hear about, especially in left-wing circles, that First Nations have been here for time immemorial,

00:18:40.660 simply not true. And that at a certain point you have to recognize that Canada is a country. It was

00:18:45.620 built up because of the contributions mostly of people from Scotland, England, France working, yes,

00:18:52.580 with the Aboriginal people. But it was the hard work by subsequent waves of immigrants as well.

00:18:58.900 We built a country, enough with the billions and billions of dollars. You also highlight how much

00:19:04.420 money is spent trying to rectify $20, $30, $40 billion a year to First Nations. It's never ending.

00:19:13.060 And yet, sorry to say, it doesn't seem like the quality of life for First Nations people has actually

00:19:17.700 gotten a lot better despite the $40 billion in transfers that they get every year.

00:19:22.180 So at a certain point, you kind of have to say enough is enough. I'll let you tell us a little

00:19:26.660 bit more about that piece. It was really interesting. I recommend everyone go give it a read as well.

00:19:30.580 Well, thanks for the boost. Yeah. Actually, Mark Milkey was the primary author, but I'll take indirect

00:19:36.900 credit because Mark is a former student of mine. I supervise this PhD thesis. So it was nice of him to

00:19:44.500 invite me in to fill in a few holes in the draft. Yeah, the whole settler terminology is very pernicious. 0.61

00:19:56.260 The word settler makes sense when you're writing about the

00:20:02.100 frontier, you know, the first European settlers in Canada. Yeah, that makes sense. But then to

00:20:09.140 turn that into a continuing term, that everybody descended from those people remains a settler

00:20:16.580 forever. You know, I happen to be an immigrant, I was born in the United States, and I came to Canada

00:20:24.260 as an immigrant. But you, you know, you were born in Canada, you have no other country, 0.99

00:20:30.740 other than Canada. You can't go back to, I don't know where your ancestors came from, England,

00:20:37.540 I suppose, at least in part. You know, we're all, we're all here in Canada. And so calling some people

00:20:44.660 settlers and other people indigenous is setting up an extremely bad polarization. So this, this vocabulary 1.00

00:20:54.180 of the whole, the concept settler colonialism comes from woke ideologies, one more malignant

00:21:02.020 outgrowth of progressive or woke ideology, which tends to divide the human race into dichotomies of

00:21:11.780 oppressor and oppressed. So you get men and women or straight versus gay or whatever it may be. In this

00:21:20.900 case, it's whites and others versus Indian and throwing in Métis and you know it as well. 0.62

00:21:30.020 Excuse me. So yeah, that that's the root of the of the problem is this is this distinction. And

00:21:38.340 original Canadian policy. We didn't have time to go space to go into that in that piece. But the

00:21:45.540 original Canadian policy was to set aside refuges for Indians or what we now call First Nations,

00:21:52.660 which would be temporary in nature. And these would be places where they would be protected

00:22:00.260 from the movement of white civilization while they learned the arts of civilization,

00:22:06.660 which at the time was meant to include mainly literacy, agriculture and Christianity. We would

00:22:14.100 formulate it differently today. But in the understanding of the 19th century, that's what it was.

00:22:19.220 So the reserves were, were meant to be temporary. And the goal was ultimately enfranchisement,

00:22:26.660 as they called it, for all the Indians or First Nations people. Now, you know, like many government

00:22:33.460 policies, it didn't turn out that way. It became what was thought to be temporary,

00:22:37.780 became permanent, and now reserves are treated as sort of homelands, which are too small and have

00:22:44.420 to be enlarged by claims on so-called traditional territory, which is a term that really has no

00:22:51.540 legal definition, you can make it almost whatever you want it to be, as we've seen in

00:22:56.660 in the college in case, where a fishing station, which, you know, by nature is transitory, but that

00:23:06.180 becomes basis of a claim to Aboriginal title. I mean, I think that's one of the weak points in the

00:23:12.100 decision is that to prove Aboriginal title, you're supposed to prove that you had permanent occupation

00:23:18.180 to the exclusion of others. But that's, you know, very questionable in the case of

00:23:23.220 a fishing village on the other side of the channel. So anyway, but I come back to the settler

00:23:33.780 colonialism thing. That's a very pernicious doctrine. It's become so established now.

00:23:40.740 It's influencing debate, but it's, we've got to fight against that. Maybe there's another book there.

00:23:46.900 Well, there you go. No, I think that's right. So often, you know, we're kind of on the front lines of

00:23:52.020 the culture war here, and especially spending time on social media, you'll see that that term

00:23:56.260 settler is used as a derogatory slur against white people, basically. And, you know, you're right to 1.00

00:24:02.420 say that it exists in a historical context, but it shouldn't be used to divide us today. I, you know,

00:24:08.100 more and more, the more I read about this, the more I think we just need to have one category of

00:24:12.660 Canadians and do away with the whole system of reserves and special rights and all these things 0.94

00:24:16.900 which are meant to help. But actually, I think in so many ways, they hold us back. Well, Tom,

00:24:21.700 I'm really excited about this book, Dead Wrong, How Canada Got the Residential School Story

00:24:26.020 So Wrong. You know, it's just, you're right, there's so much that's happening, so much happening

00:24:30.980 every day. You know, the shocking unwillingness of the New York Times to retract a headline calling

00:24:35.300 the mass graves at Kamloops, even though we know there is no such thing, you know, firing of school

00:24:40.100 teachers, this documentary, Sugarcate. There's so much in the book, folks. So I really recommend that

00:24:45.540 you go pick it up, help it become another bestseller. I have an essay in there as well,

00:24:50.260 from my perspective of what how the whole thing went down. So very pleased to be a part of this,

00:24:54.340 and always a pleasure to have you, Tom, on the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

00:24:58.500 Okay, well, thanks for having me. All right, folks, that's all the time we have for today.

00:25:01.620 Thank you so much. We'll be back again soon. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is Candice Malcolm Show.

00:25:04.740 Thank you and God bless.

00:25:10.100 I'm Candice Malcolm.

Juno News - November 27, 2025

How Canada got the residential school story wrong

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript