Juno News - November 27, 2025How Canada got the residential school story wrong
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
159.8307
Summary
A sequel to the book, "Grave Error," written by Dr. Tom Flanagan and C.P. Champion, about the alleged discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada in the early 20th century.
Transcript
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
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.
00:01:47.520
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
00:02:18.500
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
00:05:43.300
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,
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.
00:12:50.020
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
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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
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.