In this episode, I sit down with Dr. David Rubenstein and his co-author, Prof. Robert Rulliard, to discuss the controversial issue of the missing children buried in the cemeteries across Canada.
00:00:00.000You know, it took some pushing, it took some prodding on your part, on the part of Professor Rubenstein and the other one, Rulliard, getting out there and saying, look, you know, this whole thing that's been going on, there's a lot of pieces that don't fit or there's a lot of discussion that's not happening or a lot of assumptions are being made about what happened that aren't accurate.
00:00:18.820And finally, it seems to hit a tipping point, though, where we're having a public discussion on what actually happened with these residential schools and these burial sites.
00:00:26.020Yeah, it's interesting how, what we've been doing, a group of us have been digging into the issue and publishing our findings.
00:00:36.600At the beginning, we were pretty much frozen out of what you might call the legacy media or corporate media.
00:00:43.440We published in, let's call it alternative media, like Western Standard, True North, Dorchester Reviews, it's a small historical journal.
00:00:53.560And we published quite a bit of stuff, putting forth a different interpretation about the unmarked graves.
00:01:00.040Finally, last week, we had a bit of a breakthrough into the legacy media.
00:01:04.000There was a big spread in National Post.
00:01:06.700I expect many of your viewers have seen that by Terry Glavin.
00:01:13.320There was one front page, and not only front page, but several internal pages, I mean, much larger than any newspaper normally grants space to an author.
00:01:26.660And in addition to that, there was coverage in the New York Post, which is the oldest newspaper in the United States, and in several Quebec newspapers.
00:01:35.340So it's a bit of a landmark for us in trying to broaden the discussion, and we hope there will be lots more.
00:01:41.940Yeah, and I don't like driving too many of our viewers to other outlets, but that's okay.
00:01:46.020I mean, Glavin's piece was outstanding.
00:01:47.520And as you said, it's rare when you get such a long one, particularly in a print medium.
00:01:52.760I mean, that takes – I would imagine there was a lot of discussion before going into something that controversial and going that deep between the editors, like, do we want to go there?
00:01:59.760Do we want to give him this much ink on this issue?
00:02:04.100Yeah, I'm sure there was – I'm sure it was discussed.
00:02:06.860It's also interesting that about a year ago, Mr. Glavin published a much shorter column about the findings in Kamloops, which took a sort of a conventional point of view that, yes, these were unmarked graves and wasn't terrible and on and on and on.
00:02:22.860So he's really reversed himself over the course of the year.
00:02:28.700Perhaps the publications of our group have had something to do with that.
00:02:34.020I don't care where it comes from, but the point is that now a different view of this is getting a wider audience, and I think that's terrific.
00:02:45.160And, I mean, we don't ever want to punish people for just admitting – even if he didn't go into the admitting he was wrong, but just changing the view.
00:02:50.420Hey, if he's changing correctly, then good on him.
00:02:53.160And as you said, maybe it was because of reading – and there was some stuff in the Dorchester Times as well that really dug into that a fair amount, too.
00:03:00.960Professor Riyard's article was a bit of a bombshell.
00:03:04.320I mean, it got – well, I haven't looked at the number recently, but at one time it was way over 100,000 hits for something published on – put up on the website of a fairly small circulation historical – it's absolutely unprecedented.
00:03:20.820And that showed that there was a hunger for getting the truth about these so-called unmarked graves.
00:03:27.860So we've been working on it ever since, and, you know, we're making a little progress.
00:03:31.980But the politicians are deeply invested in the story.
00:03:35.260I mean, the prime minister with his half-masked flags, and now he's got the governor general talking about it as well.
00:03:44.860It's going to be hard for them to climb down because they have made such an ostentatious display of allegiance to a story for which there are, in fact, no supporting facts.
00:04:01.380With all the hype and publicity, ground-penetrating radar has found some soil disturbances, which could conceivably be burials, particularly when they go looking in cemeteries.
00:04:14.460It's not surprising that they might come up with a burial.
00:04:16.880But absolutely no evidence that any of these are burials of so-called missing children.
00:04:24.140So it's – I repeat, it's the biggest fake news story in my lifetime, you know, perhaps since the New York Times cover-up of the Holocaust in the Ukraine and this mass starvation in the Ukraine, I guess, was a bigger fake news story.
00:04:49.580And, I mean, a lot of people were horrified.
00:04:51.360If you read it on the surface when it initially was breaking, and if you believe that that's what was happening, that they were really abusing these children en masse and hiding the burials, I mean, it's mortifying.
00:05:02.140And, you know, you're correcting the record later, but a lot of the damage and trust and emotion and things has happened.
00:05:08.040Like, where do you go to start recovering from this?
00:05:14.260First, we had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission accusing Canada of cultural genocide.
00:05:19.400And now, with the claims about unmarked graves, it sort of moves into a literal, physical genocide.
00:05:27.480And, you know, unless you read these stories very carefully, they are horrified.
00:05:32.600Now, if you read carefully, you start to see details that don't add up, like claims that six-year-olds were rousted out of bed in the middle of the night to go dig graves and that babies were thrown into furnaces and bodies were seen hanging on meat hooks in the barn.
00:05:51.740And, you know, a lot of these details, you know, they go beyond the unlikely into the realm of the virtually impossible.
00:06:02.020But not everybody researches stories that carefully, you know, and how can they?
00:06:06.360People have busy lives and they look at the headlines.
00:06:08.360So, yeah, tremendous, tremendous harm has been done already.
00:06:13.420Yeah, and anecdotal evidence, you know, I mean, it really has to be examined, particularly when it's verbal and such emotional matter.
00:06:21.580I mean, the people saying some of those stories might have heard them from somewhere and a friend of a friend.
00:06:25.040But that shouldn't be making newsprint unless you can verify things like that, something that horrific.
00:06:30.720This, for people with long memories, and maybe you have to be a little bit gray-haired for this, but remember the moral panic about daycare centers.
00:06:41.420And there was all kinds of testimony about awful sexual assaults taking place in daycare centers and people went to jail for it.
00:06:51.480You know, and it all turned out to be complete nonsense, overheated imaginations of children being asked leading questions.
00:07:00.640A lot of the details in these stories are actually reminiscent of the daycare center moral panic.
00:07:07.580And there are some, we haven't got time to explore it today, but there are some actual historical linkages between those stories and the ones that we hear now.
00:07:16.720Well, and I think perhaps a little bit of both is what more emotional area can you get than the care and safety of your children in both cases?
00:07:24.080It's something that really gets people fearful and empathizing.
00:07:26.960I mean, you can imagine if somebody else's child is abused, you're horrified as well on their behalf.
00:07:32.900And you understand why people react to it.
00:07:34.960But when you look analytically at it, what's happening here is, well, so-called oral tradition, it's always, you know, not somebody who saw these things, but somebody who talked to somebody who saw these things.
00:07:50.960It's that kind of, that's that kind of testimony, which gets passed down and gets exaggerated.
00:07:56.140It's like the game of telephone where you whisper around a circle and the story keeps changing as it gets carried on.
00:08:03.260So, but to come back to the starting point here, I think what's really important is the complete irresponsibility of the corporate or legacy media who picked up these stories as soon as they came out and started to run with them.
00:08:17.400And did not ask elementary questions that any good researcher would ask, like, what is the factual evidence for these claims?
00:08:26.800The New York Times, for heaven's sake, supposed to be the leading newspaper in the world, published a story about mass graves in Kamloops.
00:08:35.900You know, exaggeration upon exaggeration.
00:08:38.160And these are supposed to be the leading parts of our news media.
00:08:44.180I mean, I say thank God for outlets like the Western Standard, which are not part of this.
00:08:51.640No, that's really the, I think the story for today is the complete irresponsibility of the legacy media on this story.
00:09:03.800Self-correction is not a common feature of human beings, Corey.
00:09:07.620So, none of us like to admit what we've been wrong, but they were absolutely wrong.
00:09:13.300Professor Rubenstein, you know, asking this, this was a few months ago, why can't we find Canada's missing residential school students?
00:09:19.500And we published that, and it was well-written and well-sourced, and it did okay, you know, but we also got some pushback, some negative emails saying, oh, you guys, you know, you're trying to deny a tragedy.
00:09:31.500I mean, some of the incentive for even smaller media outlets or bigger is the sensational, the horror is going to grab you the clicks.
00:09:37.600And it's so measurable now with digital that I think they feel inclined to just, they want to sensationalize the horror of this, unfortunately.
00:09:46.620Yeah, well, the pushback is starting now in the legacy media.
00:09:50.800There was an editorial today in the Winnipeg Free Press, or not an editorial, but a guest column by Negan Sinclair, who's the son of Murray Sinclair.
00:09:58.840He's the younger Sinclair as a professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba.
00:10:04.960But he embarrassed himself by going on a long rant, which has no factual content at all.
00:10:11.740It's political rather than professorial.
00:10:45.200I mean, there was somewhere when I had Professor Rubenstein on this show before, and I had stated actually in a question saying, well, it must be hard.
00:10:52.880You know, there couldn't be many records from the schools from back then and things like that.
00:10:56.920It's very well documented where the children were, where they were transferred.
00:11:00.580And in fact, these schools, that's the way they got paid.
00:11:03.560If you didn't document who you had and where they were, you know, even if you're just looking on the self-interest level, they had every interest in documenting it.
00:11:43.060But in 100 years and at a time when there were no antibiotics and tuberculosis and other diseases were killers of children, it's not a huge total.
00:11:53.260Anyway, 51, not 200, 51 deaths were documented at the school.
00:11:59.080And death certificates are available for these children in the archives of the province of British Columbia.
00:12:35.660The whole missing children thing is a fable based upon misuse or overlooking historical sources that are there.
00:12:48.100You know, it's really a disgrace that the TRC spent so much public money and ended up generating so many legends without making proper use of sources that would have been readily available to it.
00:13:01.220And, I mean, you know, the investigation even at the time, it was surprising out of journalism.
00:13:04.860Because, I mean, you still, to a degree, you want to get those scoops and things like that.
00:13:08.880Like the famous, or you can almost call it infamous, picture of Trudeau kneeling with the teddy bear at a cemetery and his head down, the photo opportunity.
00:13:16.840That one was covered in Glavin's story as well.
00:15:57.800And I would hope that all people of intelligence and goodwill can agree upon historical evidence and historical fact and can recognize fake news when they see it.
00:16:12.020Well, I appreciate the work you've been doing and the work you're going to carry on doing.
00:16:18.160As more information surfaces, it's going to take a while, but we can correct this wrong and maybe set an example so we don't see something like this happen again.
00:16:25.040Okay, well, thanks for looking into the story, Corey.