“The “unmarked graves” farce is arguably the greatest journalistic scandal in Canada’s history.”
‘What If They Ultimately Find Nothing?’ by Jonathan Kay
https://quillette.com/2026/05/23/canadas-newspaper-of-record-asks-what-if-they-ultimately-find-nothing/
“On Wednesday [May 27, 2026], it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school.”
“In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.”
“It all turned out to be complete nonsense.”
“Over the last half-decade, several outlets have (grudgingly, in most cases) admitted that they got the original story wrong—including the National Post, New York Times, and, more surprisingly, the CBC.”
“But many others, including the Globe, had never (to my knowledge) explicitly done so—whether out of embarrassment, fear of being labelled an enemy of Indigenous “reconciliation,” or, more likely, some combination of both.”
“The Globe article has two bylines on it: Patrick White and Willow Fiddler. White is listed as a specialist “on reconciliation and justice issues.” Fiddler is an Indigenous journalist whose beat is “Indigenous Affairs.” In the past, both have written Globe stories that repeat the false claim that “bodies” and “remains” were found at the site of Kamloops’ “unmarked graves.” In neither case have their erroneous stories been corrected or retracted by the Globe.”
“Back in 2021, for instance, White not only repeated the false claim that “215 children’s remains” had been discovered in Kamloops, but also misinformed Globe readers about what he called “the discovery of 182 human remains in unmarked graves” at another B.C. location. This was fake news then, and it remains fake news now.”
“In paragraph five, those detestable “denialists” make their appearance—this being a slur often used to speciously demean anyone who (rightly) points out that no unmarked graves have been found in Kamloops.”
“It’s an obscene word choice meant to suggest a moral equivalence with hatemongers who deny the documented existence of true genocides such as the Nazi Holocaust.”
“And it’s regrettable that the Globe would parrot this kind of language (especially since White and Fiddler, by the very act of admitting the unproven nature of the unmarked-graves claims, have now officially enlisted themselves in the ranks of “deniers”).”
“As my deliberately crude wording here is intended to suggest, the rhetorical trick the Globe is playing here isn’t just misleading, it’s also grotesquely reductionist. The documented deaths at residential schools were largely the result of tuberculosis.”
“The real scandal was that the entire country was convulsed by a fake story that journalists—including White and Fiddler, of course—should have treated with skepticism from day one.”
“Moreover, the idea that any community—Indigenous or otherwise—would spend five years blithely doing paperwork while the bodies of 215 murdered children were decomposing a few feet from the earth’s surface at precisely identified locations a stone’s throw away is fantastically absurd.”
“What if, like the Tulsa archeologists, they ultimately find nothing? The lowered [Canadian] flags, the vigils, the hundreds of millions in government funding, the national reckoning—what if all of it was dedicated to 215 burials that don’t exist?“
“You’d think that the last five years might have taught the article’s co-authors a thing or two about the perils of signal-boosting exactly this type of lurid tale from the crypt. Then again, the normal rules of proof and logic never really pertained to the Kamloops unmarked-graves movement.”