The Candice Malcolm Show - July 08, 2021


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


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

166.82315

Word Count

2,369

Sentence Count

135

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

Churches were burned on Canada Daylong weekend, and the media is partially to blame. Candice Malan explains why, and how the media got it wrong about the discovery of graves at former residential schools across Western Canada.


Transcript

00:00:00.080 Churches burned on Canada day-long weekend, and the media is partially to blame.
00:00:04.560 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:11.760 We're witnessing a moral panic in this country over revelations of the alleged discovery of graves
00:00:17.340 at former residential schools across Western Canada.
00:00:20.420 This panic came to a breaking point over the weekend when prominent statues were knocked down
00:00:25.840 and at least 25 churches in Western Canada were either vandalized or completely burnt down.
00:00:32.520 To make the matters worse, several prominent commentators, including politicians, journalists, professors, lawyers, and activists,
00:00:39.940 excused the behavior of the mob.
00:00:42.040 They explained away and justified these riots, and in some cases, they even cheered them on.
00:00:47.520 Burn it all down, said the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association,
00:00:51.240 once the country's strongest voice for protecting the rule of law and civil liberties.
00:00:56.940 Likewise, the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association branch said,
00:01:01.400 burn it all down.
00:01:02.780 Or how about this, from a radio host in St. John, New Brunswick.
00:01:06.740 Burn the churches down.
00:01:08.600 Arrest any staff that were actually there and any current staff that won't provide documentation.
00:01:14.040 Sell everything they own in Canada and give it to survivors.
00:01:18.100 Dismantle it completely.
00:01:19.220 And finally, not to be outdone, NDP MP Nikki Ashton cheered on the mob who toppled down statues
00:01:26.960 at the Manitoba legislature, calling it decolonization and saying,
00:01:32.060 no pride in genocide.
00:01:33.820 This kind of reckless language would be universally condemned if, say,
00:01:38.140 it were right-wing commentators talking about, well, anything.
00:01:41.740 It probably would be considered hate speech.
00:01:44.180 These accounts would be banned from social media platforms,
00:01:46.360 and the individuals behind them would probably have police officers knocking at their doors.
00:01:51.520 Likewise, it doesn't even need to be said, but if instead of churches,
00:01:55.100 these were synagogues, mosques, Sikh temples, or any other sacred space,
00:01:59.800 it goes without saying that every politician in this country would be urgently condemning it.
00:02:05.060 There would be candlelit vigils across the country,
00:02:07.040 and the RCMP would have launched a nationwide manhunt for those responsible.
00:02:12.140 It would be the top ongoing story in the country.
00:02:15.700 Instead, there's this sort of feeling that the church burnings are somehow justified,
00:02:19.580 that this violence is only to be expected,
00:02:21.940 and that this is all somehow a legitimate reckoning for our historical and collective sins.
00:02:26.900 So, how did we get here?
00:02:29.220 How did we get to this point of extreme tension, anger, and violence in our country?
00:02:34.120 Well, it's been six weeks now since the allegation was first made
00:02:37.660 by the chief of the Tekemloops Band in Kamloops, British Columbia,
00:02:41.140 who claimed to have discovered 215 unmarked graves
00:02:44.340 belonging to children who attended the residential school there.
00:02:47.900 Since that time, two other bands have come forward with similar allegations,
00:02:51.620 751 graves found in Cowessess, Saskatchewan,
00:02:56.240 and another 182 in Lower Kootenay, B.C.
00:03:00.060 Over these past six weeks, the story has evolved.
00:03:03.300 New facts have been uncovered,
00:03:04.880 and we've gotten a clearer picture of what exactly happened in these communities
00:03:07.980 and what exactly was uncovered.
00:03:10.860 But regardless of these new facts,
00:03:13.320 the media has allowed the narrative to get away from the truth.
00:03:17.300 Sensational headlines exaggerating the story
00:03:19.560 led some to truly believe that these graves were evidence of mass murder,
00:03:24.720 death camps, genocide, and of a legitimate holocaust in Canada.
00:03:29.200 So, let's take some time today to look at those facts
00:03:32.420 and to dissect the many ways that the media has gotten the story so wrong,
00:03:37.200 which has led us to this place.
00:03:39.720 Okay, first things first.
00:03:41.060 It's important to note that the story at this point is merely an allegation.
00:03:45.360 Nothing has been proven.
00:03:46.220 In fact, no evidence has been put forth for public consideration.
00:03:50.980 No reports have been released.
00:03:52.940 Every news story thus far has merely been based off of the claims
00:03:56.660 made by band leaders from these three bands.
00:03:59.820 This may be a minor point, but it's still an important distinction.
00:04:03.100 The typical standard in the media would be to clarify
00:04:06.100 that these allegations have not yet been proven.
00:04:08.900 Second point.
00:04:10.100 There has been incredible confusion over what exactly was discovered here.
00:04:13.760 My friend J.J. McCullough has made the same point on Twitter,
00:04:17.060 showing all the various ways that the media have described this discovery.
00:04:21.600 Let me just read a few.
00:04:22.720 So, according to NPR, they said that the remains of 215 children
00:04:26.520 have been found in a mass grave.
00:04:29.020 CTV wrote that the 215 children were recently uncovered.
00:04:34.040 Canadian Press said that the unmarked burial site
00:04:37.440 believed to contain the remains of 215 children.
00:04:40.620 CBC said that the remains of 215 children could be buried at the site.
00:04:47.000 Global News said that the remains of 215 children
00:04:50.320 were discovered in an unmarked burial.
00:04:52.940 And another story in the CBC said that the band announced
00:04:55.620 the search had confirmed the presence of the remains of 215 children.
00:05:00.720 So you can see the variation here.
00:05:02.740 The First Nations band leader said that they used ground-penetrating radar.
00:05:06.280 So there was no excavation, nothing was on earth, nothing was uncovered,
00:05:11.120 there were no bodies found, and no identities confirmed.
00:05:14.720 So let me refer back to a National Post story
00:05:17.060 that I've talked about before on the show,
00:05:18.800 and it explains what ground-penetrating radar actually does.
00:05:23.140 So for this report, they interviewed a professor of anthropology
00:05:26.520 who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology.
00:05:31.540 She said this of ground-penetrating radar,
00:05:34.440 quote,
00:05:34.740 It doesn't actually see the bodies.
00:05:37.160 It's not like an x-ray.
00:05:38.660 What it actually does is look for the shaft.
00:05:41.080 When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug,
00:05:43.600 and the body is placed in the grave,
00:05:45.280 sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context.
00:05:49.120 What the ground-penetrating radar can see
00:05:51.020 is where that pit itself was dug,
00:05:53.960 because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave.
00:05:56.920 And occasionally, if it is a coffin,
00:05:59.100 the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well, unquote.
00:06:02.440 So this technology is not completely accurate,
00:06:06.100 and it doesn't tell us anything about who is buried.
00:06:09.380 So this brings me to my third point
00:06:10.780 about what the media has been getting wrong,
00:06:12.740 and that is whose graves were actually discovered.
00:06:15.800 The first band in Kamloops claimed that the graves
00:06:18.380 belonged to children at the former residential school.
00:06:21.960 So when the second two bands came forth with their claims,
00:06:25.260 many in the media just sort of conflated all the information
00:06:28.160 and said that these graves, too,
00:06:30.420 were from children at residential school.
00:06:33.020 But that's not what the claim is.
00:06:34.680 In fact, in both the cases of the Cowessess
00:06:37.120 and the Lower Kootenay,
00:06:38.700 the graves were believed to be community cemeteries
00:06:41.700 belonging to both First Nations
00:06:43.760 and the broader Canadian community.
00:06:46.060 So this is tucked away at the very end of a report
00:06:48.180 in the Globe and Mail
00:06:49.060 on the findings of that Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan.
00:06:52.660 It says this,
00:06:53.540 It appears that not all the graves contain children's body,
00:06:57.260 Lorette said.
00:06:57.820 Lorette is one of the band leaders.
00:07:00.180 He said the area was also used as a burial site
00:07:03.080 by the rural municipality.
00:07:05.320 We did have a family of non-Indigenous people show up today
00:07:07.960 and notified us that some of those unmarked graves
00:07:10.700 had their families in them,
00:07:12.200 their loved ones, he said.
00:07:14.080 So what we have here is an abandoned community cemetery
00:07:17.260 where people of different backgrounds were buried.
00:07:20.320 So that's quite the leap from the original storyline,
00:07:22.620 which were that these graves all belong to children
00:07:25.280 who died at the residential school.
00:07:27.740 And this brings me to my next point.
00:07:29.740 Fourth, these are not mass graves.
00:07:32.260 So we saw this right off the bat.
00:07:34.240 Several media outlets, both in Canada
00:07:36.020 and international outlets like BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN,
00:07:40.040 New York Times, and Washington Post,
00:07:41.980 all erroneously labeled these findings as mass graves.
00:07:45.960 This is incredibly irresponsible.
00:07:48.200 The chiefs themselves explicitly stated
00:07:50.420 that these are not mass graves.
00:07:52.620 This is not a mass grave site.
00:07:56.640 These are unmarked graves.
00:07:59.520 So why is this important?
00:08:01.440 Well, mass graves are a hallmark of genocide.
00:08:04.160 They conjure images of pure evil,
00:08:06.140 the kind of evil that characterized
00:08:07.640 the collective governments of the 20th century,
00:08:10.220 governments like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
00:08:14.320 These were truly evil leaders who used mass graves
00:08:17.720 to cover their atrocities and crimes against humanity.
00:08:21.360 These leaders carried out mass murder,
00:08:23.300 and the mass graves went hand in hand.
00:08:25.940 So using this term, mass graves, is wrong,
00:08:29.480 and it's also reckless,
00:08:30.340 because it conflates Canada's policy,
00:08:33.220 which was forced assimilation
00:08:34.700 through mandatory universal education.
00:08:37.400 It conflates that with actual Nazi death camps.
00:08:41.220 Now, we should be clear, Canada's policy was wrong.
00:08:44.380 It was misguided, and in too many cases,
00:08:46.780 those who were responsible for caring for children
00:08:49.280 in this country let them down,
00:08:50.840 and they let the whole country down.
00:08:52.780 But that doesn't put Canada's residential schools
00:08:55.380 on any sort of equivalence with Auschwitz
00:08:58.160 and actual Nazi concentration camps.
00:09:01.480 And that brings me to my fifth point,
00:09:02.820 which is also connected, which is the cause of death.
00:09:05.100 So many of the children who died at these schools
00:09:06.880 died of natural causes.
00:09:08.300 According to the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015,
00:09:11.740 the number one cause of death for children
00:09:13.660 at these schools was tuberculosis.
00:09:15.760 The number two cause of death was influenza.
00:09:18.800 Now, you can argue that these children
00:09:20.120 didn't receive proper healthcare,
00:09:21.760 and that some of their immune systems
00:09:23.280 simply couldn't handle living in close proximity
00:09:25.340 to other children.
00:09:26.180 But negligence resulting in accidental death
00:09:29.280 is very different from firing squads and gas chambers.
00:09:33.540 And yet, there was this weird universal assumption
00:09:36.100 in the media that the discovery of these graves
00:09:38.780 was somehow evidence of Canada's Holocaust,
00:09:41.860 and that these children had been deliberately killed
00:09:44.300 in some kind of a genocide.
00:09:46.820 Look, genocide requires intent.
00:09:49.640 It requires a concerted and systematic effort
00:09:52.100 to conduct mass murder
00:09:53.420 and eliminate an entire race of people.
00:09:56.180 Canada's residential schools, however misguided,
00:09:59.120 had the intent of educating children,
00:10:01.040 of assimilating them into the broader Canadian population,
00:10:03.900 and ultimately, of lifting children out of poverty.
00:10:06.800 The policy was wrong, clearly.
00:10:08.640 It was flawed, and it resulted in much harm.
00:10:11.480 But there are a few orders of magnitude
00:10:13.460 that separate the misguided intent
00:10:15.620 of Catholic priests, nuns,
00:10:17.860 and Canadian government officials
00:10:19.800 versus those of Nazi soldiers
00:10:22.080 in the Second World War.
00:10:23.260 Next, the sixth point where the media
00:10:25.820 gets this story completely wrong.
00:10:28.340 It's possible that the graves that we're talking about
00:10:30.820 are not even necessarily unmarked graves.
00:10:34.260 Did you see this story in global news over the weekend?
00:10:37.540 The headline reads,
00:10:38.800 We knew it was there.
00:10:39.960 Former BC chief says unmarked graves
00:10:42.220 near Cranbrook need more context.
00:10:44.360 And I'm going to read this story
00:10:47.220 almost in its entirety
00:10:48.700 because it's so remarkable.
00:10:51.040 So it says,
00:10:51.980 The detection of human remains
00:10:53.960 in unmarked graves
00:10:55.060 at the site of a former residential school in BC
00:10:57.240 was not an unexpected discovery,
00:10:59.820 according to the area's former chief.
00:11:02.440 On Wednesday, it was confirmed
00:11:03.580 that ground-penetrating radar
00:11:04.800 found 182 unmarked graves
00:11:06.960 in a cemetery
00:11:07.600 at the site of the former
00:11:09.300 Kootenay Residential School
00:11:10.540 at St. Eugene Mission,
00:11:12.320 just outside Cranbrook, British Columbia.
00:11:14.600 The remains were found
00:11:15.820 when remedial work
00:11:17.000 was being performed in the area
00:11:18.920 to replace the fence
00:11:20.040 at the cemetery last year.
00:11:22.520 Sophie Pierre,
00:11:23.440 former chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band
00:11:25.480 and survivor of the school itself,
00:11:27.740 notice how they use the term survivor.
00:11:29.480 Again, this is supposed to
00:11:30.820 conjure images of Holocaust survivors
00:11:33.060 and they just, you know,
00:11:34.100 also use it here
00:11:34.900 to describe people who went to a school.
00:11:37.120 But it says,
00:11:37.960 A survivor of the school
00:11:39.020 told Global News
00:11:39.940 that while the news
00:11:41.040 of the unmarked graves
00:11:42.140 had a painful impact
00:11:43.520 on her and surrounding communities,
00:11:45.240 they had always known
00:11:46.640 the graves were there.
00:11:48.400 There's no discovery.
00:11:49.240 We knew it was there.
00:11:50.800 It's a graveyard,
00:11:51.840 Pierre said.
00:11:52.900 The fact that there are graves
00:11:54.200 inside a graveyard
00:11:55.220 shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
00:11:58.180 According to Pierre,
00:11:59.600 wooden crosses
00:12:00.260 that originally marked
00:12:01.340 the grave sites
00:12:01.980 had been burned
00:12:02.880 or deteriorated over the years.
00:12:05.060 Using a wooden marker
00:12:06.220 at a grave site
00:12:07.480 remains a practice
00:12:08.460 that continues to this day
00:12:10.120 in many Indigenous communities
00:12:11.540 across Canada.
00:12:12.900 So when we're talking
00:12:14.160 about these so-called
00:12:15.120 unmarked graves,
00:12:16.160 what we're more likely
00:12:17.500 talking about
00:12:18.240 is abandoned cemeteries.
00:12:20.140 Abandoned cemeteries
00:12:21.200 where people
00:12:21.700 of different backgrounds,
00:12:22.840 not just children
00:12:23.440 from residential schools
00:12:24.560 and not just
00:12:25.220 First Nations people
00:12:26.240 were buried.
00:12:27.200 We should obviously
00:12:27.820 make an effort
00:12:28.380 to address this problem
00:12:29.620 and make sure
00:12:30.340 that graves and cemeteries
00:12:31.800 are cared for.
00:12:33.320 But what an amazing
00:12:34.680 leap of logic
00:12:35.740 to go from
00:12:36.940 an uncared community cemetery
00:12:38.800 to mass graves,
00:12:41.140 mass murder,
00:12:41.940 and genocide.
00:12:43.620 Mark Twain once said,
00:12:44.840 never let the truth
00:12:45.620 get in the way
00:12:46.040 of a good story.
00:12:47.340 Well, for many journalists,
00:12:48.680 it seems,
00:12:49.420 they never let facts
00:12:50.560 get in the way
00:12:51.100 of a good narrative.
00:12:52.380 And that narrative
00:12:52.980 is that Canada
00:12:54.000 is an evil
00:12:55.200 white supremacist nation
00:12:56.540 that committed genocide
00:12:57.800 against its First Nations people.
00:12:59.760 It's not true,
00:13:00.580 but that is the narrative
00:13:01.720 that they are pushing.
00:13:03.260 So is it any wonder then
00:13:04.740 that some out there
00:13:05.840 are so angered
00:13:06.820 by this news
00:13:07.480 that they've reacted
00:13:08.540 with violence and rioting?
00:13:10.660 Or is it any wonder
00:13:11.580 that a radical faction
00:13:12.860 of the far left
00:13:14.220 are using this crisis
00:13:15.260 as an opportunity
00:13:16.180 to wreak havoc,
00:13:17.720 tear down our history,
00:13:19.040 tear down all the statues,
00:13:20.360 and burn down the churches
00:13:21.520 that they hate so much?
00:13:23.220 Of course,
00:13:23.980 these violent criminals
00:13:24.920 who are burning down churches
00:13:26.280 are the ones
00:13:27.060 who are to blame
00:13:27.640 for their own actions.
00:13:29.080 But the media
00:13:29.900 are also partially to blame
00:13:31.340 for raising the temperature,
00:13:33.260 for pushing
00:13:33.820 a hysterical narrative
00:13:35.180 that in no way
00:13:36.040 represents the facts
00:13:37.080 of this story,
00:13:37.980 and for wrongly
00:13:39.100 and recklessly
00:13:39.960 accusing Canada
00:13:41.320 of unspeakable crimes
00:13:42.660 like genocide.
00:13:44.080 I'm Candace Malcolm,
00:13:44.920 and this is
00:13:45.420 The Candace Malcolm Show.
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