Western Standard - May 28, 2026


Kamloops residential school debate erupts at B.C. legislature

Topics
residential school denialism
Mentioned
Billy Coombs Francis Whittowson Lindsay Shepard Jim McMurtry Dallas Brody Elizabeth II Alex
＂He has fueled a lot of resentment from people who can't work,＂ Poilievre on Guilbeault's Net-Zero A mission to preserve Canada's Cold War air force history

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

170.47

Word count

1,414

Sentence count

102

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Western Standard's Alex Blanchard is in Victoria, BC on the anniversary of the discovery of the alleged 215 mass graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, and he's joined by author and academic Frances Widdowson.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Are you making a comparison between Auschwitz and Canlacenia Residential School?
00:00:04.520 Not directly. I'm making a comparison between Holocaust deniers and residential school deniers because it is identical. 0.87
00:00:11.880 They're playing from the same place.
00:00:13.300 Do you know that $12.1 million was allocated in 2021 for excavations to be done at the Canlacenia Residential School?
00:00:24.080 Do you know how the Indian Trust Fund works?
00:00:26.400 Answer the question.
00:00:27.080 Um, do I know? No, I don't pay attention to specific numbers. So yeah, I'm not a capitalist. Sorry. I don't know.
00:00:39.220 Alex with the Western Standard here. I am sitting in front of the BC legislature in Victoria. It is a beautiful day.
00:00:46.300 We are expecting, um, Francis Widdowson, Mount Royal University professor, Lindsay Shepard, former BC conservative staffer and author,
00:00:53.160 Jim McMurtry, former school teacher from Abbotsford, Dallas Brody, leader of 1BC and several others to be descending on Victoria to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the alleged 215 mass graves discovery at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
00:01:11.420 We were expecting a large group of counter-protesters or even a modest group of counter-protesters. None of them have shown up yet. I was talking to one of the attendees earlier and we were saying maybe it's just too early in the morning.
00:01:21.780 It is noon, but generally these protesters don't come out until after dark.
00:01:27.960 We may see them at some point, but the event is supposed to be starting rather quickly here, and so signing.
00:01:34.360 We're at, folks. 1.00
00:01:36.660 Frances has weirdly chosen to spend the last years of her life harassing residential school survivors. 1.00
00:01:42.260 What a sweetheart, eh? 1.00
00:01:43.660 You will tell you she only cares about Kamloops, but she does indeed have a storied history of a total ratio of indigenous people.
00:01:52.480 Before she was fired, she was a member of the Secular Humanist Society and was specifically focused on suppressing indigenous ways of being and conflating it with religion.
00:02:02.400 This is not about Kamloops.
00:02:04.700 In terms of your argument, you're saying because I'm critiquing aboriginal policy, that makes me a racist or a white supremacist?
00:02:13.660 So don't you think that in order to build better Aboriginal policy people should be able to discern what is not rational about it and figure out what the flaws are in the argument?
00:02:28.660 I do, I do, but I think it requires a deeper understanding than you may have. 0.93
00:02:32.660 I don't know that you really can look at a situation from the outside such as yourself.
00:02:38.660 Even as an academic, like, I study all sorts of different topics,
00:02:42.280 but I don't pretend to know somebody's experience.
00:02:44.440 So I think when it's coming to policymaking,
00:02:46.400 when it's coming to actual things that affect people's day-to-day lives,
00:02:49.900 you really need to be careful about consulting with people
00:02:52.020 that have that lived experience.
00:02:53.500 And when you don't, you just come across like a racist purpose.
00:02:56.360 So challenging, challenging lived experience is racist? 0.98
00:03:01.600 Challenging lived experience is a dick move, yeah.
00:03:06.020 I wouldn't say it is inherently racist.
00:03:08.660 So when you're challenging the lived experience of multiple people, when you're challenging the lived, paired with documentation at the time,
00:03:15.440 paired with reports from residential school doctors saying, please, these children are dying at a rate much higher than intended.
00:03:21.680 When you're doing things like that, it starts to all get put together, and it looks racist.
00:03:25.960 Yeah.
00:03:26.500 So are you aware of the person Billy Coombs?
00:03:29.600 No, but we're here to talk about Kamloops, I thought.
00:03:31.900 That has to do with Kamloops.
00:03:33.200 Okay.
00:03:33.560 So, Billy Coombs was a residential school survivor, and he argued that Queen Elizabeth II abducted 10 children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1964.
00:03:46.740 Do you think that that should be believed because that's his lived experience?
00:03:50.720 I think that it would have to come to an agreement.
00:03:55.640 Yeah, I think you should believe that if you really want to.
00:03:58.660 Sure.
00:03:58.840 I mean, you don't have to believe me.
00:04:01.660 Yeah. 0.69
00:04:01.800 Like, my grandma went to residential school, you're not going to believe me that she had empty free spit buckets every day and got her assy for not scrubbing the floor fast enough.
00:04:09.500 I know you won't believe me. It happened. She was highly traumatized, my dear. It happened.
00:04:16.220 Okay, but in terms of Billy Coombs, Queen Elizabeth II wasn't even in Kamloops in 1964.
00:04:23.660 So if we're going to believe the lived experience of Billy Coombs, that means we're going to believe false information.
00:04:30.040 So residential school denialism is taking a certain specific topic like Kamloops and saying,
00:04:36.660 okay, soon as you prove that there were 215 bodies, then we'll believe you about all the other stuff.
00:04:42.560 All the other stuff.
00:04:44.300 Just that one little thing will believe you.
00:04:46.460 Yes. 0.91
00:04:46.840 That's why they had to create the Holocaust Museum, my friend. 0.83
00:04:49.480 And there are still people out there.
00:04:51.260 I'm not comparing it to the Holocaust.
00:04:52.460 I'm not comparing it to the Holocaust, just to be clear.
00:04:56.120 I am saying that Holocaust deniers and residential school deniers have the same problem.
00:05:04.900 No, they don't!
00:05:06.120 This is not mine!
00:05:07.580 I don't think I'm going to give an intro, you guys.
00:05:09.600 I feel so popular.
00:05:10.680 Wow.
00:05:11.500 Do you believe that the remains of 215 children have been confirmed at the campus in a residential school?
00:05:16.780 I do not believe it has been confirmed because GPR has its limitations.
00:05:20.860 However, this is a process that takes time, dedication, sensitivity.
00:05:24.900 We're talking about the possibility of digging up people's relatives who have been missing and who have been gone.
00:05:30.900 If you look at the statistics of the reduction of the Indigenous population during the period of residential schools,
00:05:37.120 it does not matter if there were 215. 0.90
00:05:40.120 The number is much, much greater.
00:05:42.420 It is much, much more complex than what you're making it.
00:05:45.700 And by making it solely about Kamloops, you are actually then further cutting off any sort of discussion.
00:05:51.200 Do you think we should have the truth about the Kamala Senior Residential School as to whether there are children buried at that school?
00:05:57.500 I think that the truth will come out in time, and there are a lot of other interesting and meaningful resources that people can familiarize themselves on this long-standing, you know, colonization thing.
00:06:08.760 Do you know that $12.1 million was allocated in 2021 for excavations to be done at the Kamala Senior Residential School?
00:06:19.300 Do you know how the Indian Trust Fund works?
00:06:22.040 Answer the question.
00:06:23.020 Do I know? No, I don't pay attention to specific numbers, so, yeah.
00:06:27.140 I'm not a capitalist, sorry, I don't know.
00:06:31.760 Public funding.
00:06:32.860 Do you think that public funding that is allocated for a purpose should be spent for that purpose?
00:06:37.200 Yes, I do.
00:06:38.140 So, therefore, you think that excavation should have been done between 2021 and 2023?
00:06:44.140 Not necessarily. I think that this is a complex process that takes time, as I already stated.
00:06:48.240 But you just said that you think that public funding should be spent for what it's allocated for.
00:06:53.240 And so that's what it was allocated for between 2021 and 2023.
00:06:57.240 But Frances, I'm not putting a time limit on these people's processing of this issue.
00:07:02.240 But they just are getting more and more money as they are.
00:07:04.240 They put a time limit on it.
00:07:06.240 They said between 2021 and 2023 they were going to do it.
00:07:09.240 Yes, and if you would actually read what's been happening,
00:07:12.240 there's a lot of complexities involved in the technology, in the cultural protocol.
00:07:17.240 these are things that take time and these are things you have to have a little bit of patience
00:07:21.480 but i know you have patience you've been hammering on about this since 20 2001 that's why you got
00:07:25.960 fired this is your current pet issue it is not about this how's your meeting going by the way
00:07:35.320 this is cool you guys are nice thank you so do you know that i was wrongfully
00:07:40.840 terminated from Mount Royal University I know because you're not supposed to
00:07:45.400 harass your colleagues online or it's not professional behavior it's maybe
00:07:49.160 flies in 2026 because everybody is the rage bader these days but stop behavior
00:07:55.660 unsafe behavior you don't do that I am talking to her I don't want more
00:08:00.520 excuses well the arbitrator said that I was wrongfully terminated the Alberta
00:08:06.400 Labor Relations Board says that the arbitrator was unreasonable in his decision that I should
00:08:12.800 not be reinstated, therefore I will be reinstated at Mount Royal University.