THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE, PM

  This past summer came the sensational claim that 215 bodies had been found in a mass grave at Kamloops, British Columbia. These were, according to the claim, children who had somehow died under mysterious circumstances, or were even murdered and secretly buried, with the forced help of their fellow students – “some as young as six”.
  And what was the evidence supporting this claim? It was from people known as “knowledge keepers” who purportedly had a “special way of knowing” and a junior anthropologist who had used a portable radar device – with the “knowledge keepers” telling her where to look. There were no bodies, just “soil disturbances”. Despite the weakness of this evidence the media presented it to Canadians as proof of genocide.
   An example of this “special way of knowing” is this: one knowledge keeper declared that “in 1500 the Pope decreed that all non-Catholic children at residential schools should be put to death.” Never mind that there were no residential schools in 1500 in Canada, or that no Pope had ever made such a decree. That example says everything you need to know about her “way of knowing”.

At this point one would have expected a number of things to happen. In the first place, you would expect journalists to closely question this astounding claim, made on such incredibly flimsy evidence. Secondly, you would expect both government and church spokespeople to vigorously push back against such explosive and impossible statements, with the facts.