Government-appointed special interlocutor on residential schools Kimberly Murray released her final report on Tuesday, and is again calling for those who question the residential schools narrative in Canada to be fined or jailed, as well as tracked by the feds.
Murray was appointed in 2022 by Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General at the time, David Lametti.
In her June 2023 Interim Report, Murray urged the federal government to implement “legal mechanisms to address denialism, including implementing criminal and civil sanctions.”
Her October 2024 “Final Report on the Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada” again asks the federal government to make “downplaying” or “justifying” the residential school system illegal.
“The federal government must amend the Criminal Code, making it an offence to wilfully promote hatred against Indigenous Peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian Residential School System or by misrepresenting facts relating to it,” the report reads. “The federal government must include provisions in Bill C-63: An Act to Enact the Online Harms Act to address the harms associated with denialism about Indian Residential Schools.”
Murray also calls for the implementation of a government-run system to track dissenters. She writes that the federal government must combat Indian Residential School denialism by “tracking the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation about Indian Residential Schools, missing and disappeared children, and unmarked graves and burial sites.”
Murray writes that online social media platforms, digital companies, and search engines must be government-regulated and required to “immediately remove the dissemination of misinformation, disinformation, and falsehoods about Indian Residential Schools, missing and disappeared children, and unmarked graves and burial sites.”
In her report, Murray singles out former senator Lynn Beyak, “Grave Error” author and political scientist Tom Flanagan, and indigenous affairs expert and author Frances Widdowson as “denialists.” Murray claims the National Post newspaper is guilty of fueling residential school denialism.
Murray says that those who don’t consider the residential school system a “genocide” are denialists. Additionally, those who say they “do not know the truth about the deaths at Indian Residential Schools” are denialists, in Murray’s view.
In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps First Nation of Kamloops, B.C. announced that they had discovered the “remains” of 215 residential school students in unmarked graves. That July they downgraded their claim to 200 “targets of interest,” and in the years since then, they have stopped providing any updates at all and gone silent.
The “215” narrative caused a moral panic in Canada, with over 112 churches burned down or vandalized as revenge against Christian-operated residential schools and flags lowered for several months in 2021.
Murray’s report claims that “media institutions have failed to investigate or apologize for their complicity in settler colonialism that has perpetuated harms against Indigenous Peoples,” and calls for reparations from media, universities, and the medical profession.
From the federal government, Murray demands “penalties, effective monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms” upon those who question the mainstream narrative about residential schools and do their own research.
