RECONCILIATION – Genocide declaration fails Indigenous children

FIVE YEARS after the Kamloops announcement, the evidence has still not caught up to Parliament’s genocide declaration.

On October 27, 2022, the House of Commons gave unanimous consent to a motion by opposition MP Leah Gazan of Winnipeg Centre, declaring that Canada’s Indian Residential School system constituted genocide under the United Nations Convention. No formal recorded vote took place. Parliament committed the country to that designation without a division of the House.

The motion arrived 14 months later. On May 27, 2021, Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. Churches burned.

Not one body has been found. Not at Kamloops. Not anywhere.

The scan described soil anomalies, not confirmed human remains. Archival records showed that septic field tiles installed in Kamloops in 1924 produced GPR readings indistinguishable from those of graves. Of roughly 20 similar announcements by 2023, excavations yielded no residential-school-related burials.

Some will say that further investigation may yet confirm what Chief Casimir announced. Perhaps. The resolution passed on no evidence and unrealized expectations.

In a free society, accusations of genocide require evidence, at least proportionate to the gravity of the charge. Parliament chose to dispense with that requirement. It declared Canada guilty of one of humanity’s greatest crimes while the claims remained unverified. That is not due diligence. It is political theatre masquerading as moral certainty.

Canadians were never obliged to prove that genocide did not occur. The burden rested, and still rests, on those making the allegation. Yet Parliament reversed that principle, endorsing the conclusion before the evidence.

Parliament paid a price for that failure. The number of Canadians expressing confidence in the federal government fell below 50 per cent in 2023 and has not recovered. Credibility, once spent on an unverified premise, does not return easily.

Canada has been here before. In August 1914, Parliament passed the War Measures Act hastily, enabling the internment of more than 8,500 persons in the First World War and around 22,000 Japanese Canadians in the Second. The Mulroney government repealed the Act in 1988 and issued a formal apology. Urgency and unanimity are not substitutes for sound judgment.

The internment parallel is instructive given what followed. Two years after the genocide motion passed, Ms. Gazan introduced Bill C-413, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment for denying or downplaying the residential school system; prorogation killed it but Gazan re-tabled it in 2025. First declare a genocide on unverified evidence, then criminalize asking whether the evidence warranted it. That is the logic that produced internment camps.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that the system amounted to cultural genocide: a coercive assimilation policy. It did not find physical extermination. Calling the schools cultural genocide is an arguable historical verdict. Calling them genocide, unmodified, tells Indigenous children that their country tried to murder their ancestors wholesale. Those are not the same claim.

Reconciliation built on a false foundation will not hold. A Parliament willing to trade its judgment for moral approval will not recover the trust it forfeits in the transaction.

Any sitting MP can introduce a motion to rescind or amend Ms. Gazan’s resolution. The evidentiary foundation on which it rested has not been confirmed, and the historical record does not support the unqualified genocide designation. The Government of Canada ran an assimilationist program, not a mass murder campaign. Parliament should be capable of saying both things at once.

Indigenous children deserve the truth. All of it. Parliament, which failed them once with a rush to judgment, can begin to make that right. It would go a long way toward restoring what has been squandered.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

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