Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.
This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school.
It was a shocking revelation, we were told, about a residential school system the Canadian government mandated from the 1860s to the 1990s — a system that in some cases forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and sent them to boarding schools run by Catholic priests and nuns, often in rural and remote areas. According to the liberal mainstream narrative in Canada, these schools were places of abuse and “cultural genocide.” To those crimes, the tribal leaders in Kamloops declared, could now be added the horror of heretofore hidden mass graves.
There were a million reasons to be skeptical of the story when it first appeared, not least of which was the preliminary nature of the findings and the fact that the site in question had not been excavated for human remains. But major corporate media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and The Globe and Mail simply repeated the central claim as fact, stating unequivocally that the remains of 215 children had in fact been found at Kamloops. CNN called it a “gruesome discovery.” The Washington Post said the mass graves story had “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.”
The only problem was that it wasn’t true. There were no mass graves, no gruesome discovery, and no conspiracy of bigoted Catholic schoolmasters. That much has been obvious for years, if it wasn’t obvious enough when the story first appeared. Only now, five years later, The Globe and Mail, one of the major media outlets that helped perpetrate the hoax, has published an editorial mea culpa on the entire affair.
“Five years after the startling announcement that there were hundreds of possible unmarked graves near a residential school in Kamloops, B.C., there has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains,” the editors write. “The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion.” The editorial goes on to note how the language used to discuss the claims about mass graves moderated as time went by, becoming less certain and more qualified. But that evolution of language, “does not erase the initial failure of journalism.”
So far, The Globe and Mail is the only media outlet that has owned up to its role in perpetrating what amounted to a blood libel against the Catholic Church. In 2024, I wrote about how no human remains had ever been exhumed from the sites of the purported mass graves, despite millions of dollars spent looking for them. Two years later, that’s still the case.
But in 2021, evidence and actual reporting didn’t matter, and the hoax was simply reported as fact. The outrage that followed was immediate and forceful. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who sought to make this Canada’s very own “George Floyd incident,” ordered flags lowered to half-mast at all federal buildings “to honour the 215 children whose lives were taken at the former Kamloops residential school” — as if the children had been murdered by Catholic nuns. The late British Columbia Premier John Horgan called it “a tragedy of unimaginable proportions” and said he was “horrified and heartbroken.” The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was a “large scale human rights violation” and that the Vatican should investigate. A year later, Pope Francis actually came to Canada and apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church.
In the meantime, vigilante violence broke out across the country. Dozens of Catholic churches were set ablaze by arsonists or vandalized in the wake of the Kamloops story, including historic churches that belonged to indigenous congregations, as well as churches that had no connection whatsoever to the residential schools. The ones that weren’t burned to the ground often had “charge the priests” scrawled in red paint on the walls. Trudeau said nothing. Most local authorities said nothing. The executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association posted on X, “Burn it all down.”
Ironically, while this anti-Catholic hysteria unfolded there was an effort underway to criminalize dissent on the question of the residential schools. Indigenous rights activists demanded a law criminalizing what they called “residential school denialism” and categorizing it as hate speech. One member of Parliament, Leah Gazan, actually introduced a bill to that effect. In 2023, two years after the initial claims, the Trudeau government’s “special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools” released a report calling for “urgent consideration” of civil and criminal penalties for “denialism,” citing laws passed in some countries that criminalize Holocaust denial.
Anyone who dared doubt the Kamloops story was promptly cancelled. A teacher who questioned the existence of the mass graves was fired. A political science professor in Calgary was fired for suggesting that the residential schools had some educational benefit. Censorship and punishment were all ramped up at the expense of free speech. Canadian tribal leaders routinely called the residential school system a “genocide,” and compared the nuns and priests who ran it to Nazis.
It didn’t matter that in the ensuing months, or even years, no hard evidence of mass graves ever emerged. It didn’t even matter that the researcher who performed the initial ground radar survey clarified and qualified her findings, saying, “With ground-penetrating radar we can never say definitively that they are human remains until you excavate … which is why we need to pull back a little bit and say that they are probable burials.”
But no excavations were ever undertaken at Kamloops — at the insistence of the very tribal leaders making the accusations. For Canada’s establishment left, the story was too good to be checked. It confirmed every liberal assumption and prejudice about the Catholic Church, while valorizing indigenous Canadian tribes. It also “proved” that Canada, like the United States, was a systematically racist country.
All of this unfolded in the aftermath of the George Floyd and BLM riots during the summer of 2020, which kicked off a hysteria about racism in both the U.S. and Canada that has now, thankfully, begun to subside somewhat.
But the mass graves hoax in Canada stands as a stark reminder of how the left can, under the right circumstances, gin up a moral panic. The interplay of activists networks, powerful institutions, and narrative tropes pushed by a sympathetic press all came together, in this instance, to create an alternative reality about mass graves that didn’t exist.
The real story of Canada’s “mass graves,” then, isn’t about residential schools or racism or the Catholic Church. It’s about how liberals are willing to demonize their opponents with outlandish fabrications and calumnies, destroy free speech under the color of law, incite violent mobs to punish perceived evildoers — and years later, when the dust clears and it turns out the whole thing was a hoax, you might get a single editorial to admit that, in hindsight, mistakes were made.
