Millions of people across Canada paid solemn tribute to the Indigenous victims of the residential school system on September 30, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. But even as awareness grows of the genocidal policies of residential schools, which operated coast-to-coast-to-coast from 1883 to 1997, there is also an alarming rise in residential school denialism.
In January, The Atlantic published a defence of John A. Macdonald and settler colonialism (“Against Guilty History”) written by ex-George Bush Jr. speech writer David Frum. According to Frum, Canada’s first Prime Minister “tried to save Native lives the way he thought best.” In Macdonald’s own words, this meant that “Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”
To Frum this should not be considered genocide. The United Nations, on the other hand, is quite clear. Genocide means any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group [including] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Frum doesn’t deny that residential schools existed, nor that they were the sites of horrible atrocities. But denialism rarely takes the form of refuting the schools’ existence. Instead, it rejects or misrepresents basic facts about residential schooling to undermine truth and reconciliation efforts.
In British Columbia, undermining the truth about residential schools is threatening to go mainstream. In the most recent federal election, the Conservative Party’s Aaron Gunn took North Island-Powell River from the NDP despite widespread calls from Indigenous leaders for him to be removed as candidate. In multiple posts to his social media account, Gunn denied that the Canadian state’s actions could be classified as genocide, and claimed Indigenous people asked for residential schools.
Gunn received support in the form of a letter signed by multiple elected officials from both the provincial and municipal levels of government on Vancouver Island, as well as from Pierre Poilievre. In both cases, the attacks on Gunn were labeled “misinformation” because Gunn “has not denied the impact of residential schools.”
At the provincial level, exiles from the BC Conservatives have formed the OneBC party as a home for extreme reactionaries who deny Canada’s genocidal treatment of Indigenous people.
Interim leader Dallas Brodie formed OneBC after being expelled from the BC Conservatives. She has scaremongered about UNDRIP, calling it a nightmare; blamed Indigenous people for the conditions in the Downtown East Side; and denied that there were any graves found at Kamloops Indian Residential School. The BC Conservatives finally had enough of her when she decided to “publicly mock and belittle testimony from former residential school students, including by mimicking individuals recounting stories of abuses – including child sex abuse.”
The latest such controversy in BC took place only a few days before this year’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, when BC Conservative board member and communications officer Lindsay Shepard posted on social media that hanging the orange Survivor’s flag outside of the BC legislature was a “disgrace.”
Residential school denialism doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Its rise correlates to an accelerated drive towards resource extraction. Every defence of Aaron Gunn names him as a champion for the resource sector. The OneBC platform pledges “ending control over public resources on the basis of racial identity or historical grievances.”
And while reactionaries attack the truth, the actions of the Liberals and the NDP cannot be considered reconciliatory in any meaningful way.
Carney’s Liberals are aggressively pursuing “national development” policies that directly contradict the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act has undone decades of progress by rolling back the commitment of past governments to at least the semblance of free, prior and informed consent. Chief Don Tom, Vice-President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), said that “Bill C-5 signals a dangerous shift away from rights recognition and environmental accountability at a time when both are most needed.”
The BC NDP’s Bill 14 and Bill 15, the Renewable Energy Projects (Streamlined Permitting) Act and the Infrastructure Projects Act, are provincial compliments to Bill C-5. UBCIC, First Nations Summit and BC Assembly of First Nations jointly signed a letter to BC premier David Eby which said that “these bills appear to be designed to turn back the clock on all of the progress we have made together toward reconciliation in this Province.”
Meanwhile, the provincial state apparatus has been preparing for the resistance that they rightly anticipate. In 2024, the BC RCMP rebranded its controversial Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) as the Crisis Response Unit (CRU).
C-IRG has been the target of widespread condemnation from Indigenous organizations, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and journalists who have been forcibly prevented from documenting their actions. A BC court ruled in February that C-IRG officers violated the Charter rights of three Wet’suwet’en land defenders during a raid enforcing a corporate injunction for the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
CRU has already been exposed for surveilling activists who might oppose pipeline projects, leaving little hope that a new acronym will preface any tangible change.
As all this unfolds, only 15 of the 94 Calls to Action which developed out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work have been completed. Even slower progress has been made on the 231 Calls of Justice contained in the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. These are not failures to reach abstract or symbolic demands.
In British Columbia, the average life expectancy among First Nations people dropped by more than six years between 2017 and 2021, from 73.3 to 67.2 years. In BC, Indigenous people are more than six times more likely to die from toxic drug poisoning. In Greater Vancouver, Indigenous people make up 34 percent of homeless despite being 2.4 percent of the population, and have seen an increase in homelessness of 30 percent since 2023.
Residential school denialism is a smokescreen used to evade the state’s role in an ongoing genocide, and to justify the removal of the rights won by UNDRIP.
In September 2024, Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan proposed a parliamentary bill to include residential school denialism in the Criminal Code alongside Holocaust denialism. It unfortunately failed to go anywhere. But it is a goal that could be achieved by a popular movement led by survivors and Indigenous communities, and including climate activists, housing advocates, and everyone who takes human rights seriously.
Truth is a fundamental democratic principle, and reconciliation is everybody’s responsibility on stolen land.
Robert Crooks is the BC leader of the Communist Party