Barbara Kay: Mulling Legal Sanctions Over Arbitrary ‘Residential School Denialism’ Accusations Is Dangerous Territory
Commentary
Kimberly Murray, an indigenous rights careerist appointed to advise Attorney General David Lametti on missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites associated with the Indian Residential Schools, has submitted a controversial interim report. Most troubling amongst the recommendations, Murray urges the government to impose legal sanctions on dissenters to the now received wisdom amongst our intelligentsia and political elites that the residential schools were a form of “genocide.” Shockingly, Mr. Lametti declared himself open to the notion of civil or even criminal code options to deal with these alleged “denialists.”
Journalist Terry Glavin—himself targeted as a denialist for his feature article in the National Post last year enumerating a litany of media failures in reporting on the alleged Kamloops “unmarked graves” narrative—wrote a testy response to the report, describing those making accusations of denialism as a “fringe movement.” It may be fringe in the sense that only a core group of activists promote it, but the movement’s success cannot be gainsaid. Just days ago, federal MPs stood for a moment of silence, piously to “mark the discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school in Kamloops,” even though every last one of them knows the word “discovery” is a falsehood, and the “215 children” a factually untethered hypothesis….