By James Balkwill

The government of Canada is strongly being urged to consider implementing legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism based on a new report from Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves.

No one is denying that residential schools existed, what people are concerned about is that the narrative being sold to us has been embellished and is quite simply, not the truth. People with legitimate questions are being denied any opportunity to have their questions addressed. In fact, what we see is that much of the historical record of residential school information will be destroyed.

I have no special investigative skills but in reviewing the historical records for myself, have found that the residential school story we have been told is questionable. For instance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Report compares a student’s having survived a residential school experience as comparable to a person having survived WWII. I have asked many actuaries here in Canada, all of whom have said that the two lack any commonality and are not comparable.

I would like to have somebody in government explain how they’re able to embellish the facts surrounding residential schools. I say that because if we accept the truth and reconciliation report, it states that residential schools operated in Canada for 120 years and there were 139 residential schools and that some 4200 to 4500 students went missing or did not come home during that time. Now senator/commissioner Sinclair stated that maybe up to 6000 children could not be accounted for, so let’s use Senator Sinclair’s number of 6000. 6000 students divided by 120 years equals 50 students per year divided by 139 residential schools equals 0.359. So, let’s round it up to 0.36. The result accepting their numbers is that just over 1/3 of a student per school per year went missing.

The failure here is that this is being presented to the people of Canada as if only indigenous students went missing, did not come home or died at school. The writers of this report also fail to consider the impact of the illnesses and pandemics that swept across Canada such as the Spanish flu which took the lives of 50,000 Canadians and was especially hard on children five years of age and under.

Mainstream media including the CBC allowed for all kinds of allegations to be made by the indigenous community against non-indigenous Canadians. We have been accused of genocide without any evidence to support the allegations. I, like many other proud Canadians, took offence to that and decided to uncover the facts for ourselves. Given not one exhumation has been conducted and no forensic science has been applied to determine cause of death, makes this a very unfair situation to Canadians who actually care about what the truth is.