Five years after Canadian liberals incited a moral panic about “mass graves” of indigenous schoolchildren, almost no one will admit it happened.
Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.
This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school.
It was a shocking revelation, we were told, about a residential school system the Canadian government mandated from the 1860s to the 1990s — a system that in some cases forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and sent them to boarding schools run by Catholic priests and nuns, often in rural and remote areas. According to the liberal mainstream narrative in Canada, these schools were places of abuse and “cultural genocide.” To those crimes, the tribal leaders in Kamloops declared, could now be added the horror of heretofore hidden mass graves.
There were a million reasons to be skeptical of the story when it first appeared, not least of which was the preliminary nature of the findings and the fact that the site in question had not been excavated for human remains. But major corporate media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and The Globe and Mail simply repeated the central claim as fact, stating unequivocally that the remains of 215 children had in fact been found at Kamloops. CNN called it a “gruesome discovery.” The Washington Post said the mass graves story had “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.”
The only problem was that it wasn’t true. There were no mass graves, no gruesome discovery, and no conspiracy of bigoted Catholic schoolmasters. That much has been obvious for years, if it wasn’t obvious enough when the story first appeared. Only now, five years later, The Globe and Mail, one of the major media outlets that helped perpetrate the hoax, has published an editorial mea culpa on the entire affair.