‘Residential-school denialism’ is the newest Orwellian invention of Canadian progressives. They would like to make it a hate crime to cast doubt on the ‘genocide’ that purportedly took place in the Canadian Indian residential-school system – a long-since shut network of boarding schools for Indigenous children in which it is alleged thousands died.

The term ‘residential-school denialism’ has been coined intentionally to invoke Holocaust denialism. The latter was officially banned in Canada in June 2022, when the Canadian government used ‘hate propaganda’ provisions to amend the Criminal Code and make it a crime to ‘condone, deny or downplay the Holocaust in public statements’. It is this amendment that seems to have opened the door for more criminalisation of speech, in this case, ‘denying’ that a genocide took place in boarding schools for Canada’s indigenous population.

So it was that in June this year, Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell proposed an amendment to Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, to classify residential school denialism as ‘hate propaganda’. Karetak-Lindell explained that ‘indigenous peoples have been targeted for generations through discrimination, violence, and the denial of their lived experiences’. She then argued that the already established legal precedents in the Criminal Code, categorising Holocaust denialism as ‘hate propaganda’, should be extended to ‘residential-school denialism’.

If nothing else, Karetak-Lindell’s attempt to use existing hate-speech precedents around Holocaust denialism to justify a ban on ‘denying’ something else is a good example of the slippery slope tendency that inheres in all hate-speech laws. It’s a good reason in itself to oppose them.

People should, of course, be free to question and scrutinise the official narrative around Canada’s residential schools. There is certainly a history of indigenous people being treated appallingly in Canada, including in residential schools. But to liken this treatment to a genocide is a stretch. After all, a ‘genocide’ implies the intentional extermination of an entire race or people. Was this genuinely the purpose and effect of Canada’s residential schools?

It looked as though this framing might have been justified when, in June 2021, reports emerged of a radar-generated ‘discovery’ of ‘mass graves’ of indigenous children on old residential-school sites in Canada. In the words of one Canadian media report, ‘preliminary findings from a survey of the grounds at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School have uncovered the remains of 215 children buried at the site’. The Canadian Press called it the ‘story of the year’.

Yet in the intervening years, the story has unravelled. Ground-penetrating radar had not found definite evidence of mass graves – it had found anomalies. These were never confirmed to be the bodies of anyone at all, never mind children. Despite millions of dollars in federal funding provided for ‘for field work, records searches and to secure the residential-school grounds’, no excavations were done.

Nevertheless, Kimberly Murray, the special interlocutor appointed by the Canadian government to produce a report on these supposed unmarked graves, concluded in 2024 that a genocide had indeed taken place. ‘The histories of the cemeteries that were located at former Indian residential-school sites are evidence of genocide and mass human-rights violations’, she wrote. The goal of her report, she explained, was to ‘counter denialism by demonstrating there were cemeteries, where children were sometimes made to work, at residential schools and other institutions’.

In other words, Murray produced a report intended to push an ideological agenda, not an evidence-based one. The decision had already been made to label anyone questioning the existence of these graves and the associated ‘genocide’ as a ‘denialist’ and thereby guilty of a hate crime.

In July, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) passed an emergency resolution calling on Canada to criminalise residential-school denialism. By not criminalising residential-school denialism, ‘the country that we live in perpetuates hate crimes’, said Garrison Settee, grand chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, which represents 26 First Nations across Manitoba. ‘It is a shame to live in a country that will not protect our people from hate crimes’, he added. 

Bill C-9 passed in June, though Karetak-Lindell’s amendment was rejected. As Jeremy Bellefeuille, a spokesperson for justice minister Sean Fraser, put it, ‘Indian residential-school denialism is a serious and distinct issue’. It ‘does not fit within the scope of what the Combatting Hate Act was designed to do’, he continued.

The issue is far from off the table, though. The prospect of criminalising what’s been labelled ‘residential-school denialism,’ but is in fact the questioning or challenging of a particular narrative, is supported by many activists, politicians and indigenous leaders.

NDP MP Leah Gazan’s private member’s bill proposing an amendment to the Criminal Code, criminalising residential-school denialism, was tabled in parliament last autumn and is now waiting for its second reading in the House of Commons. Should Bill C-254 pass, anyone ‘condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential-school system in Canada or misrepresenting facts relating to it’ could face up to two years in jail.

Theoretically, this could apply to people like Tim Thielmann, a former indigenous-rights lawyer and director of a documentary called Making a Killing: Reconciliation, Genocide and Plunder in Canada, which questions the progressive narrative surrounding Canada’s residential schools and the funding attached to that narrative.

It could certainly apply to Frances Widdowson, a Canadian academic who has been arrested more than once for attempting to discuss her criticisms of ‘dominant residential-school narratives’. Indeed, following two petitions in 2023 calling Widdowson a ‘residential-school denialist’, the University of Lethbridge, cancelled a scheduled lecture, entitled ‘How “woke-ism” threatens academic freedom’. Matthew Woodley, the lawyer representing the University of Lethbridge, said that hosting Widdowson could ‘retraumatise Indigenous students and staff and create a “psychologically unsafe environment”’.

Niki Sharma, deputy premier and attorney general of British Columbia, echoed the AFN’s call for the government to either amend Bill C-9 or create new stand-alone legislation that ‘criminalises the public condoning, denial, justification or minimisation of Indian residential-school denialism as a form of hate speech against First Nations’.

Should the federal government abide by these demands, seeking the truth about Canada’s history may well become a crime.

Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer and host of The Same Drugs.