A new Senate committee report is recommending the federal government take “every action necessary” to combat “residential school denialism.” “The committee heard about ongoing denialism about residential schools and that some individuals deny the negative effects on generations of indigenous peoples,” reads the report released on July 19, “Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth,…

The Steering Committee for the Residential Schools National Monument has announced a prominent location on Parliament Hill where the future memorial will be built to honour survivors and victims of residential schools. The announcement follows calls from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) for the federal government to “commission and install a publicly accessible, highly…

Commentary On April 1, a new website was launched by the Indian Residential Schools Research Group (irsrg.ca) whose mission is to share with the public historical materials concerning the residential-school system, materials that uphold “the highest standards of research, evidence, and logic in the pursuit of the truth, wherever that may lead. Most importantly, we…

Commentary Winnipeg is close to saying goodbye to Bishop Grandin. Soon, the streets, and anything else that bears his name, will be erased from Manitoba’s history. Before that step is taken in historical revisionism, city councillors might at least pay respects to the man who was once considered to be a founding father of this…

Commentary The case of Jim McMurtry is now well known to Canadians. He is the Abbotsford schoolteacher who told his class the truth about the claim that 215 indigenous students had been killed and secretly buried at Kamloops Indian Residential School—and was fired for it. He said that any students who died at the school…

A B.C. high school teacher was escorted out of his classroom by two staff members after telling students the majority of residential school deaths were caused by illness. “I was walked out like a criminal. They can’t walk a teacher out of school unless the teacher is a direct harm and immediate harm to children,”…

The federal government will pay an international organization $2 million to provide indigenous communities with advice and options around identifying possible human remains buried near former residential school sites. Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said in a statement that his office will be signing a technical agreement with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which is…

The federal government on Jan. 21 announced it would pay $2.8 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by members of two B.C. First Nations bands seeking compensation for students who attended residential schools as day scholars. Day scholars refer to students who attended residential schools during the day and returned home each day, as distinguished from…

Commentary On May 30, 2021, the Canadian Federation of Students issued a statement to Canadian schools, declaring: “On Thursday, May 27, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found buried in an unmarked mass grave at the Kamloops Residential School [in British Columbia]. These were acts of cultural violence, genocide and colonialism.” Within days, this…

Commentary Many of Canada’s important historical figures have seen their statutes toppled and their names erased from buildings and maps in recent years in an outburst of historical cleansing. Among the victims: Sir John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, and Samuel de Champlain, all former heroes and nation builders. Whatever good these dead…