The Candice Malcolm Show - June 02, 2021


Is the media narrative getting away from the facts of this story？


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

174.56058

Word Count

1,930

Sentence Count

131

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In this episode, Candice talks about the shocking discovery of the remains of 215 children buried near a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, and how the media and the public are treating it as genocide.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, and welcome to the Candice Malcolm Show. I'm your host, Candice Malcolm. Thank you
00:00:09.040 so much for joining me today. It has been a while. The show has been on hiatus for a
00:00:13.420 while because I was away. I had a baby in November, but we're bringing it back now.
00:00:18.680 We'll be doing this show two days a week. So thank you so much for tuning in. I really
00:00:23.260 appreciate your support. To find out more information about this podcast or if you'd
00:00:27.420 like to support it, head on over to tnc.news slash donate. That's True North, tnc.news slash
00:00:35.740 donate. All right, let's get to the news. So today I'm going to talk about the biggest story
00:00:40.540 in the country right now. It's been dominating the headlines all week, and obviously it is
00:00:45.320 a very sensitive subject. I'm talking about this report that came out over the weekend
00:00:50.080 about the apparent discovery of 215 children's remains found buried near a residential school
00:00:57.180 in Kamloops, British Columbia. So first, I want to say that this story is invoking quite
00:01:03.280 an emotional reaction across the country, and you can understand why. It's obviously
00:01:08.160 a very, very upsetting topic in general. The topic is very sensitive. I'll just say this
00:01:13.960 for myself. As someone who leans libertarian, especially when it comes to the idea of families
00:01:19.680 and a parent's right to raise their children however they want and how they see fit, the idea
00:01:24.840 that the government once had a policy where it would remove children from their homes
00:01:28.660 is incredibly upsetting, and I wholeheartedly condemn it, obviously. Likewise, as the mother
00:01:35.100 of small children, the idea of children being separated from their parents is horrible. It's
00:01:41.340 very upsetting. So I understand why this story is creating such a stir and such an emotional
00:01:47.520 reaction across the country. But the reason I want to talk about it on this podcast, I want
00:01:53.160 to talk about it with you today, is because I believe that the reaction and the media narrative
00:01:58.260 is really running into some dangerous territory for us as a country. We now have people invoking
00:02:05.360 the Holocaust, saying that what happened here equates to genocide, that this story confirms
00:02:11.520 genocide, and treating these residential schools like they were some sort of a death camp. Now
00:02:16.880 look, I condemned residential schools. I think they were a bad idea, obviously. I think
00:02:22.160 we all agree on that horrible things were done and the policy was regrettable. But I think
00:02:28.160 we get into some dangerous territory as a country when we start equating our history and what
00:02:33.660 happened to the Nazis, to a Holocaust, and pretending that these schools were some kind of a murder
00:02:39.680 camp or a death camp. So before we just accept this narrative, let's go back to the facts of
00:02:44.700 the story. Let's go back to the original story and try to discern what facts we know at this
00:02:49.880 point. So this entire story came from one news release. This news release was issued by the
00:02:57.160 Kamloops Band. So this is it. It came on May 27th from the Kamloops Sekemki. Apologies, I probably
00:03:05.660 didn't pronounce that properly, but the Kamloops Indian Band. So it says for immediate release,
00:03:11.000 it says it's with heavy heart that Chief Roseanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss
00:03:16.020 that was spoken about but never discovered by the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
00:03:20.740 This past weekend, with the help of ground-penetrating radar specialists, the stark truth
00:03:26.040 of the preliminary findings came to light, the confirmation of the remains of 215 children
00:03:31.420 who were students of the Kamloops Residential School. So the news release goes on to have some
00:03:38.060 quotes about how hard this is and how they have been working to verify this. So they knew that,
00:03:43.840 you know, there were stories in the community that this had happened, but they weren't able to find
00:03:47.720 any evidence. And they're saying that they have evidence now with the use of this ground-penetrating
00:03:53.160 radar. But the interesting thing about this news release is that it doesn't release a report.
00:03:59.000 It says that it basically just announces that they found the remains of 215 children.
00:04:05.360 They don't exactly say how. And then they say that the report says that they expect to complete
00:04:11.780 preliminary findings by mid-June and will be providing an update as soon as they become
00:04:17.680 available. So the preliminary findings have not yet been released. The report hasn't been released.
00:04:22.560 We're saying it's forthcoming in mid-June. It also says, please note that the Heritage Park
00:04:26.580 is closed to the public and no one will be permitted on the site for the duration of this sensitive work.
00:04:33.060 They still say that they are taking steps regarding these preliminary findings, engaging with a coroner,
00:04:38.860 reaching out to the home of communities who had children attend the school, and taking measures
00:04:44.860 to ensure the location remains protected. So again, we haven't had the official report.
00:04:51.260 We just have a news release from the chief, from this band, saying that this happened. So we go over
00:04:58.960 to the CBC story, and it kind of confirms it. You have to read it carefully. It says, the headline here,
00:05:03.220 remains of 215 children found buried at former BC Residential School First Nations say.
00:05:09.460 So at this point, it is just a claim. It's a claim that they say is coming because they hired
00:05:16.180 a specialist. So they hired the specialist in ground penetrating radar to carry out the work,
00:05:21.840 and that their language and culture department oversaw the project to ensure it was done in a
00:05:26.400 culturally appropriate and respectful way. The release did not specify the company or individual
00:05:31.780 involved or how the work was completed. Then when it comes to outside confirmation,
00:05:38.500 it says that they're working with the BC coroner service. But then in a statement to the CBC,
00:05:42.980 BC's chief coroner said that the coroner service was alerted to the discovery on Thursday.
00:05:49.060 We are in the early process of gathering information and will continue to work collaboratively
00:05:54.180 with the band and others as the sensitive work progresses. So the coroner's office has not yet
00:06:00.900 confirmed this information. So what we have at this point is a claim, not a verified report.
00:06:06.980 They haven't released their findings. There's no public access. There's no third party verification,
00:06:12.340 and there is no report. So obviously, there's a lot of questions that remain a lot of things that are
00:06:19.220 unknown at this point. So I have a couple of questions. The first thing that came to my mind is
00:06:23.780 how do we know exactly how many remains were found? How did we get to that number 215? Well,
00:06:29.220 there was a story in the National Post that I thought did a great job of explaining the radar
00:06:33.940 technology and how it works. So we're not talking about an excavation site here. They didn't dig up
00:06:39.540 anything. This was all above ground, ground penetrating radar technology. That's what we're told
00:06:45.060 that the report was used in order to find these remains. So a lot of people are asking,
00:06:51.300 you know, what is this technology? I spoke to a professor friend of mine who said that this,
00:06:55.860 that does this kind of work, and he said that this kind of technology is common. It was originally
00:06:59.940 developed to look for abandoned oil drums and those kind of things, and that now it is being used to look
00:07:05.700 at ancient cemeteries and First Nation cemeteries. So the National Post did this story. I thought they did a
00:07:11.620 great job. This was Tyler Dawson over at the National Post, and he interviewed a professor of
00:07:19.380 anthropology at the University of Alberta who focuses on this kind of thing. In the interview,
00:07:24.980 I'm going to read part of it because it's really interesting. She says, quote, so it can map all kinds
00:07:30.180 of things. It was actually originally developed for geology, but it can be applied in the context to
00:07:35.140 look for graves. It doesn't actually see the bodies. It's not like an x-ray. What it actually does is look
00:07:40.660 for the shaft. When a grave is dug, there is a grave shaft dug, and the body is placed in the grave,
00:07:47.380 sometimes in a coffin, as in the Christian burial context. What the ground penetrating radar can see
00:07:53.700 is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave. And
00:07:59.140 occasionally, if it is a coffin, the radar can pick up the coffin sometimes as well. So that's
00:08:05.060 interesting. The whole way that they knew that these graves were here was because of the coffins. Well,
00:08:10.020 that kind of flies in the face of part of the mainstream media and what the left-wing media
00:08:14.020 is telling you that these bodies were just sort of discarded into some mass grave. According to
00:08:18.980 this National Post story, what it implies is that these bodies were potentially buried properly and
00:08:25.780 respectfully. Second, the second thing that we don't know yet is none of this confirms that these
00:08:32.260 graves actually belong to children. They were found at the location of the residential school,
00:08:37.940 but they were just graves. They could have been part of a community graveyard, for all we know.
00:08:41.860 We don't have that answer yet. Finally, of course, none of this tells us about the cause of death.
00:08:48.180 We don't know how these people died. Lots of politicians and leaders are jumping to conclusions.
00:08:53.460 They're saying this was murder. Some even say it was genocide. But does the evidence really show us that?
00:08:59.700 So just keep in mind this school was open from 1890 to 1969. If we go back to 1890, just look at the statistics.
00:09:08.740 If we go back to 1890 and look at the statistics, the infant mortality rate in 1890 in Canada was 27 percent.
00:09:17.060 Twenty-seven percent. So nearly one in three children died before their fifth birthday. And this, of course,
00:09:22.660 was because of communicable diseases. We're obviously talking about a very different time. We're talking
00:09:27.540 about a time before modern medicine, before vaccines were developed. And when communicable diseases,
00:09:33.060 diseases like TB and Spanish flu were rampant and there was no real cure. So all this is to say that
00:09:41.060 my great concern here is about the policy ramifications of all of this. So obviously there are very
00:09:47.860 legitimate concerns and emotions out there right now. My worry, though, is that snap decisions will
00:09:54.500 be made without information, letting emotions drive the public policy decision. That is not a healthy way
00:10:00.980 to run democracy. Decisions should be made with a clear head. We should be examining the facts. We should
00:10:07.380 be considering the second and third order consequences of these decisions, not making snap decisions in the
00:10:13.940 reaction of a huge, huge national story that is very emotional. So all of this is to say, again,
00:10:21.380 before we jump to conclusions, we should just wait for more information. At the very least,
00:10:25.460 we should wait for the preliminary report or the official report to come out. Maybe it's not as bad
00:10:31.140 as we think, or maybe possibly it's far worse, but we don't know at this point. So let's wait for some
00:10:36.660 concrete evidence. It's always needed. And that's the standard. That would be the standard for any other
00:10:41.860 news story out there. And the same should apply for us here. All right, everyone have a great week.
00:10:47.940 This is Candace Malcolm. This is the Candace Malcolm show. I will see you next week.