The Critical Compass Podcast - Frances Widdowson ｜ The ＂Mass Graves＂ Lie & The Downfall of Universities

00:00:00.000 And the destruction of our universities is a tragedy.

00:00:06.500 My cameraman feared for his life that day.

00:00:09.160 That's how bad it was.

00:00:10.580 Eight 911 calls were made to the police.

00:00:13.260 They never showed up.

00:00:15.020 Because we must have truth about the Kamloops case.

00:00:21.140 If we can't have truth about Kamloops, we can't have truth about anything.

00:00:26.600 And we must fight now and fight hard.

00:00:30.000 Thank you very much, and thanks for inviting me to come here to give you some of my words

00:00:39.360 of wisdom on how to live in the current climate.

00:00:43.880 I find the title of this conference to be quite fitting, Bearing Witness, which I guess

00:00:52.440 I've been doing for the last several years, but certainly within the last five or six

00:00:58.520 years and my motto is constant pressure. You put constant pressure on the system

00:01:06.760 and you take it as far as you can within the current framework and you expect the institutions

00:01:16.920 to act like they should and when they don't you document that so that future generations can

00:01:24.240 understand the destruction of our institutions and where we all went wrong in trying to maintain

00:01:33.000 things like academic institutions, which is my area. And the destruction of our universities

00:01:40.580 is a tragedy because universities play a very, very important role in a democratic society,

00:01:50.100 and they really have three very very important functions. People often think

00:01:55.080 of them as you know sort of areas where intellectuals get together and and you

00:01:59.400 know pursue the truth which is which is correct that's what universities are is

00:02:03.420 truth-seeking institutions but universities are where knowledge is

00:02:09.220 disseminated to the younger generation and to the public and if we're failing

00:02:15.540 as universities we the level of knowledge is going to be seriously

00:02:20.220 corroded and I think we're seeing that throughout society is that we just do

00:02:25.380 not have the quality of knowledge that we used to have before the universities

00:02:29.420 were taken over so that's the first thing and the second thing is the

00:02:33.940 professionals that universities are where professionals are trained and if

00:02:40.080 If they are being trained by ideologues,

00:02:44.360 then your doctors, your lawyers, your teachers

00:02:48.360 are not going to be able to be fulfilling

00:02:51.120 the responsibilities that they need to be fulfilling

00:02:53.780 in a democratic society.

00:02:56.320 And the third very, very important function

00:02:58.780 is that universities,

00:02:59.820 because they're supposed to be truth-seeking institutions,

00:03:04.340 historically have been a bulwark against authoritarianism.

00:03:08.400 And if you look at an authoritarian regime like Nazi Germany,

00:03:12.300 that was one of the first targets of that regime was to remove professors

00:03:17.460 and have, you know, sort of those that were compliant to the regime installed.

00:03:22.680 And that makes the, you know, authoritarian types of tendencies become that much stronger.

00:03:28.100 And I think we are really seeing that happen now in Canadian society.

00:03:34.660 And totalitarianism is looming.

00:03:36.940 and we're not being disappeared in the middle of the night but that will come unless we fight now

00:03:44.920 and fight hard and you know people are talking about courage well yeah I get screamed at at

00:03:50.680 various events but you know no blood has been shed so far and you know George Orwell got shot

00:03:57.900 in Spain fighting the fascists so if George Orwell can go through such things without complaint

00:04:04.620 you know being yelled at and called some names it's really not that that big a deal anyway this

00:04:10.920 this destruction of the universities it seems like it's been relatively recent but it really

00:04:15.140 has been unfolding since the 1960s and the 1960s is when post-modernism began to be entertained

00:04:23.020 and for people who don't know what post-modernism is it is a relativistic philosophy

00:04:28.940 where subjective beliefs take precedence over the objective search for truth.

00:04:37.720 And that happened.

00:04:40.420 And as a result of that, we had a number of programs begin to take root in the universities,

00:04:46.720 which are known by a number of different names.

00:04:49.300 I believe it's James Lindsay and Helen Plekarose called it grievance studies.

00:04:54.560 I prefer the term advocacy studies.

00:04:57.760 So they weren't academic programs, they were arguing for a particular political position, usually on behalf of the oppressed, or people perceived to be oppressed, and this is what's known as identity politics.

00:05:13.600 So, the identities of groups that are perceived to be oppressed must be affirmed.

00:05:20.980 And that is how those groups, it's argued, will be able to overcome their oppression.

00:05:26.060 But what happens is a lot of very irrational ideas begin to be affirmed, which is a direct

00:05:34.380 threat to the truth-seeking character of the institution.

00:05:38.020 And this gained a foothold.

00:05:40.020 And they were always a marginal kind of part of the university until the 2010s.

00:05:46.940 And that's when they took over the machinery.

00:05:50.220 And you saw this in equity, diversity and inclusion offices in the universities.

00:05:57.300 And Stockwell Day, when he was giving his talk, he would refer to this as cultural Marxism.

00:06:02.220 And I don't think that's the case.

00:06:04.680 This is a corporate initiative.

00:06:07.460 And what it tries to do, it argues for proportionate representation of identity groups within management.

00:06:18.480 And so if you've got 7% of Aboriginal people in Alberta, 7% of the professors, 7% of the students, 7% of the managers and bureaucracies should be Aboriginal, is the argument.

00:06:32.920 And in order for that to happen, you've got to lower the standards. 0.79

00:06:37.460 Because you're not hiring on the basis of merit, you're hiring on the basis of identity characteristics.

00:06:43.180 And to disguise that, you say that these groups have their own ways of knowing.

00:06:53.220 And that disguises their absolute incompetence and inability to do the job properly.

00:07:01.200 And that's what I saw at Mount Royal University, which is the university I was wrongfully terminated from in 2016. 1.00

00:07:07.460 2021, because I do not accept the idea of Indigenous ways of knowing, which was being

00:07:15.300 put forward to disguise the lower standards for Indigenous students and Indigenous professors.

00:07:22.420 And as a result of that, I was pushed out of the university by an academic mob. And my case is

00:07:28.820 currently before the Alberta Labour Relations Board, and I must be reinstated at Mount Royal

00:07:34.660 University and it's they say I can't be because of the friction that is caused by

00:07:40.360 me criticizing things that people don't want to criticize and if I can't be

00:07:44.380 reinstated universities are over in Canada and so we're working hard to make

00:07:51.620 sure that that that I'm not going to be cancelled forever but it's not just

00:07:58.120 Mount Royal University that is being destroyed it's across the country and

00:08:03.900 and I've been going across the country to a number of different universities.

00:08:08.540 You might have seen me at University of British Columbia and University of Victoria,

00:08:12.440 Thompson Rivers, University of Winnipeg, which was one of the more kind of crazy scenes of 1.00

00:08:18.260 Indigenous gangsters that showed up. My cameraman feared for his life that day. 1.00

00:08:23.080 That's how bad it was. 8-9-1-1 calls were made to the police. They never showed up.

00:08:28.840 And we're still trying to get to the bottom of that. And the Justice Centre for Constitutional

00:08:33.320 freedoms has been doing great work in representing me with a number of these institutions uh trying

00:08:40.520 to hold them to account and in we're in court yesterday i'm not sure people sure people knew

00:08:46.200 that but the justice center glenn blackett the incredible lawyer for the justice center

00:08:51.800 we took we were taking the university of lethbridge it's been three years where we've

00:08:56.280 been waiting to take them to court for the cancellation of my talk on february 1st 2023

00:09:03.320 and we found out some really interesting things yesterday.

00:09:07.980 The first was that the university on January 26

00:09:12.860 had said that I would be allowed to give the talk

00:09:15.760 because of the free speech policy,

00:09:18.460 and then within 24 hours, it changed its mind,

00:09:23.720 and that's a very interesting question as to why that is the case,

00:09:27.140 and it appears that the reason is they met with an administrator,

00:09:32.140 administrator, an activist administrator by the name of Leroy Little Bear, who is an absolutely

00:09:38.060 toxic person who is in charge of the indigenization initiative at the University of

00:09:44.740 Lethbridge. And when I went back there in February 4th, 2026, which was a couple months ago,

00:09:52.780 where I had students holding up cell phones saying, we hope your ears bleed, because they

00:09:59.960 were drumming so hard in the back of my head, Leroy Little Bear said that the students did

00:10:07.440 a fantastic job in neutralizing me. That's what he said. That is an administrator from

00:10:16.460 the University of Lethbridge that said this. He should be gone. Why is he there?

00:10:23.120 i i wrote a letter to the premier and the minister of advanced education about this

00:10:33.120 they are doing nothing about the university of lethbridge that absolute disgrace of an

00:10:41.960 institution why are they not enforcing their free speech directive that they put on universities

00:10:50.320 in 2019. And I still don't have an answer to that, but hopefully we will have some accountability

00:10:57.360 from the University of Lethbridge in the near future. So there's legal and political initiatives

00:11:04.120 that have been going on, that the Justice Centre and trying to lobby the politicians to do

00:11:10.120 something about the university situation. But really the problem is a cultural one in universities.

00:11:17.560 It is that the pursuit of truth in universities has been completely destroyed, and the professors who are in charge and have taken over the unions, which is another major problem, do not think that that should be the goal of universities.

00:11:36.780 They think that universities are there to empower groups that perceive to be oppressed.

00:11:42.800 And if that means that the pursuit of truth has to be sacrificed, well, that's a small price to pay, in their view.

00:11:49.800 So that is the huge problem that we're facing.

00:11:53.000 And in order to combat that problem, one has to go and bear witness to what's happening in the universities.

00:12:01.400 And I've been doing that a couple of ways.

00:12:03.640 The first is to go in with what's called Spectre and Street Epistemology,

00:12:08.460 which was a method developed by Peter Boghossian,

00:12:12.140 who was pushed out of Portland State University.

00:12:15.540 And what you have, you have seven maths going from the strongly agree

00:12:19.820 to the strongly disagree to the neutral.

00:12:22.660 You lay out these maths on the ground,

00:12:25.820 and you have contentious claims that you put forward.

00:12:29.360 And the claim, of course, is my closest to my work is the claim is that the remains of 215 children have been confirmed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

00:12:41.740 That's the claim.

00:12:43.080 And you get people to stand on the mat that they best think represents their degree of certainty.

00:12:48.540 And if they say strongly agree, you ask them why they strongly agree.

00:12:53.720 Why are they so certain that that's the case?

00:12:55.760 And they'll say a number of different things.

00:12:57.740 For example, at University of Manitoba, I had a very, very nice Aboriginal man who told

00:13:03.220 me it's because the knowledge keepers say it's the case, and the knowledge keepers never

00:13:08.940 lie.

00:13:10.060 That was his position.

00:13:11.160 And so you'd ask questions like, well, what happens if two knowledge keepers disagree?

00:13:18.460 One says that there are remains there, and another one says that there are none.

00:13:22.940 That kind of leads people to think a little bit about that.

00:13:25.860 And if you were to hear a knowledge keeper say that they didn't believe that there were means there, would that make you less certain about your position?

00:13:34.200 So this is an excellent method because it's not about you're right or you're wrong.

00:13:38.800 It's about how certain are you about this claim and what evidence do you have to support it.

00:13:45.780 And so it doesn't get into the same kind of confrontational kinds of reactions that can happen with other methods.

00:13:53.960 Unfortunately, however, the people at universities are now so deranged

00:13:59.360 that they cannot allow that to happen.

00:14:03.120 And so at the latest kind of episodes, my mats have been stolen twice.

00:14:09.400 You cannot get people to participate.

00:14:12.620 They just accost you.

00:14:14.740 So what I've been doing is showing up with the billboards.

00:14:18.980 So billboards with what remains is one of the questions.

00:14:23.140 on the front and then denial or truth which has Dallas Brody with the sign

00:14:28.880 zero bodies that's in front of the sign saying the 250 in every child matters

00:14:34.540 and you just go in with the billboards and then have these questions that you

00:14:40.300 ask and then you can sort of do a similar kind of thing as the street

00:14:43.120 epistemology you just don't have the mats on the ground that get defaced and

00:14:48.140 stolen sort of thing. But what's been happening now is that these mobs are so aggressive

00:14:54.200 that eventually the police will drag you out of there because they don't want to do anything

00:15:02.520 about the people they should be doing something about, which is the intolerant group that cannot

00:15:08.640 even have a question asked that they dislike. They find it easier to leave the mob intact

00:15:15.240 act and take out the people who are asking the questions.

00:15:19.480 So that is a serious, serious problem in universities.

00:15:24.120 It happened at the University of Lathbridge on February 4th, where I was dragged out of

00:15:29.840 there by the police, because Tony Hall, who's a professor emeritus there, and I were going

00:15:36.560 to stay there until the crowd calmed down, and then we would have the event.

00:15:42.340 But that's the method that I use.

00:15:44.700 called the super nanny method. I'm not sure if you've seen Jo Frost use super nanny. What she

00:15:50.040 does is that she just has a lot of patience and she's dealing with toddlers who are very badly

00:15:56.680 behaved and she just keeps on taking them back onto the naughty spot until they get tired and

00:16:02.720 then eventually you can interact with them in a rational way and that's how I was dealing with

00:16:07.900 the students. And it did work in some cases at Thompson Rivers University and University

00:16:14.680 of Winnipeg, but because the police, Tony and I were going to stay there all night.

00:16:20.340 That's what we decided. We're just going to hang in here, we'll stay here all night and

00:16:24.520 eventually these toddlers are going to get tired and then we'll be able to talk to them.

00:16:30.900 But of course the police are not going to put up with that and they dragged me out after

00:16:34.420 I think it was six hours, we stood with these deranged students for six hours and what they

00:16:39.620 did is they left Tony, when they dragged me out they left him by himself, so he was surrounded

00:16:45.940 by this angry mob who then threw him to the ground outside and all sorts of other horrible

00:16:51.080 things happened.

00:16:52.080 So, that's the situation that happened at the University of Lethbridge, that was totally

00:16:55.860 unacceptable what occurred that day, the government must intervene at the University of Lethbridge.

00:17:04.180 And they sent me a letter saying, I should contact the University of Lathbridge and try to work through our differences.

00:17:11.220 It's like, that's not going to do it here.

00:17:14.960 This really is not going to do it.

00:17:16.960 So that's kind of where we are right now.

00:17:20.480 And I think, you know, just bringing up, this is a very serious problem.

00:17:25.200 because as George Orwell said in his novel 1984, freedom is the freedom to be able to state that

00:17:36.220 two plus two make four. Once that is granted, all else follows. And what Orwell is trying to get at

00:17:43.860 is the stating of facts is fundamental in a democratic society. And with this Kamloops case,

00:17:53.440 we cannot state facts like there is no there's no evidence that the remains of 215 children

00:18:01.120 have been found at the former canloose indian residential school and it is highly improbable

00:18:07.000 that that would be the case because not one parent has said that their child went missing

00:18:14.020 from that school and if that is the case who are the 215 children who would be buried

00:18:21.380 clandestinely in that apple orchard and besides we had an rcmp investigation in the 1990s

00:18:30.100 no one ever mentioned unmarked graves of the canlucinia residential school at that time

00:18:37.700 as well these knowledge keepers who supposedly said that children were woken up in the middle

00:18:44.500 of the night to dig the graves not one of these knowledge keepers has actually said this publicly

00:18:50.500 and no one even made any of these claims

00:18:54.060 before Sarah Bollier, the GPR operator

00:18:57.000 ran her GPR machine across that apple orchard

00:19:00.580 and came up with these 215 hits

00:19:02.640 which now, you know, now people say

00:19:05.760 there's 215 bodies that are buried there

00:19:08.180 so it just is a completely implausible scenario

00:19:13.440 and the fact that we cannot have truth

00:19:15.580 about Kamloops does not bode well

00:19:19.500 for the future. And so what I'm going to continue to do is in British Columbia, which is sort of

00:19:27.000 ground zero for this terrible situation with the universities, we're going into the legislature,

00:19:33.180 the BC legislature on the fifth anniversary, the fifth anniversary of the false claim that was made

00:19:40.200 may 27th 2021 on may 27 2026 five years later we're going to go and have an event on the lawn

00:19:51.000 of the british columbia legislature with dallas brody jim mcmurtry and myself and we are going

00:19:57.000 to demand that those 12.1 million dollars that we're supposed to go to the excavations

00:20:02.840 must be done because we must have truth about the Kamloops case if we can't have

00:20:12.840 truth about Kamloops we can't have truth about anything and we must fight

00:20:19.400 now and fight hard to prevent the looming totalitarianism that happens

00:20:24.560 when you cannot state facts in a democratic society.

00:20:29.980 Thank you very much.

The Critical Compass Podcast - April 29, 2026

Frances Widdowson ｜ The ＂Mass Graves＂ Lie & The Downfall of Universities

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