in World News Trudeau gov’t increases funding for residential school ‘grave’ search despite no bodies being found
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The $238.8 million budgeted in 2022 for a Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund initially had a $500,000 limit per grant application, a limit that has now been repealed despite no bodies being found.
(LifeSiteNews) –– The federal cabinet of Prime Minster Justin Trudeau is expanding a multi-million-dollar fund which is geared towards documenting thus far unfounded claims that hundreds of young children died at a now-closed residential schools, some of them run by the Catholic Church.
The $238.8 million budgeted in 2022 for a Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund initially had a $500,000 limit per grant application and included an amount up to $300,000 designated for “field work.”
The funding limits have now been repealed, however, as per Blacklock’s Reporter, with no details having been given by the department on what the new costs will be.
As noted by Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree in a recent statement, “We know this funding and these supports will never be enough to fully repair the intergenerational trauma.”
According to the department, its “intention was to fund as many initiatives as possible, but we recognize the lack of flexibility in these changes was a mistake.”
The initial funds budgeted in 2022 to aid in “locating burial sites linked to former Residential Schools” is set to expire in 2025, with some $216.5 million having been spent.
A total of $7.9 million granted for fieldwork has resulted in no human remains having been found to date.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021 when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar.
The First Nation now has changed its claim of 215 graves to 200 “potential burials.”