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After Dozens of Churches Burned, Canada's Globe & Mail Admits It Dropped the Ball on Kamloops Mass Graves

After Dozens of Churches Burned, Canada's Globe & Mail Admits It Dropped the Ball on Kamloops Mass Graves
AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
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For years, the media in Canada pushed the narrative that the Catholic Church in the country, specifically Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows in Manitoba and other churches and a residential school in Kamloops, were sites of mass graves where the Catholic Church buried the bodies of indigenous people.

As of 2023, no bodies had been found in any of these sites, but at least 68 Christian churches in the country had been vandalized or destroyed via arson.

Now, finally, Canada's Globe & Mail admitted it never scrutinized the false claims that led to the Kamloops scandal.

Here's more:

But the converse is also true. The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools. That is an extraordinary assertion, one that requires proof.

That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.

The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves” (a historically fraught phrase that does not appear in the Tk’emlúps 2021 press release).

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Ah, so the media believed the story without fact-checking, because it checked all the right narrative boxes. Only now, that destruction has happened, do they retract the story.

Remember, the government tried to use the story to criminalize 'residential school denialism.'

Yes, inquiring minds want to know.

It's almost like the destruction was the point.

This revelation has even gotten the attention of the U.S. State Department.

Rogers wrote:

People making the case for censorship often urge that destructive manias like this can be suppressed/soothed if we prevent people from communicating about them. And here was a perfect case: false information was being recklessly (or maliciously) amplified, leading to literal hate crimes. Shouldn’t the censors do something?

But the mass-grave craze infected the censorship class, so opposition got targeted instead.  At least one “disinformation” NGO categorized skepticism as “hate speech,” and Canada even saw efforts to criminalize so-called “denialism” (drawing an absurd comparison to the Holocaust).

Good for the Globe and Mail to come clean.

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Now there needs to be consequences. The Left wanted to criminalize 'residential school denialism,' and the same standard should apply to the news story that pushed a false narrative and led to the destruction of more than 30 churches.

The false story got the views. The reality did not. Every single time.

No credit whatsoever.

There can be no reconciliation without truth, and there can be no reconciliation without consequences. At a minimum, anyone at the Globe & Mail who failed to verify this story should be fired.

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