On July 26, 2024, James Heller, a barrister and solicitor from Victoria, British Columbia, wrote an email to the Law Society of British Columbia informing them that their indigenous training materials included false information about the Kamloops case. The materials stated the following:
In response to this false claim, Heller pointed out the following:
Chief Justice Marchand’s decision can be found here.
On August 9, 2024, Heller wrote a follow up email to the Law Society of British Columbia pointing out that the Special Interlocutor for Unmarked Graves’ 2023 interim proposed making “residential school denialism” illegal. This made it of the utmost importance to correct this false information in the training.
The Law Society of British Columbia ignored Heller’s request, which led Heller and a colleague, Mark Berry, to put forward a resolution for the Law Society’s Annual General Meeting. This resolution proposed replacing the words “discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children” with “discovery of a potentially unmarked burial site”.
Heller and Berry were subjected to a number of ad hominem attacks by their colleagues on the discussion forum about the resolution. A Press Release was then issued by “The BC First Nations Justice Council” accusing them of “residential school denialism” and engaging in “racism and discrimination” by putting forward the resolution.
The Law Society of British Columbia then issued its own Press Release. In this document, a link was provided to the BCFNJC Press Release and it was implied that Heller and Berry were engaged in racism.
As a result of this Press Release and the other treatment that he received, Heller decided to sue the Law Society. The Notice of Civil Claim was filed on February 4, 2025.
After hearing about Heller’s case, Dallas Brodie, the MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena, posted the following Tweet thread.
This resulted in Christine Boyle, the B.C. MInister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, to call the Tweets “abhorrent behaviour” and “residential school denialism”.
A number of arguments in support and in opposition to Dallas Brodie were posted.
This led the House Leader of the Conservative Caucus to advise Brodie to “get the latest facts”, even though what was said was true. House Leader Warbus’ comments were supported by Minister Boyle.
Warbus then stated that if you focused on “physical evidence”, you would be “called a denier” because of the supposed “end goal of your argument”.
Federal MP Niki Ashton also weighin in on Brodie’s Tweet:
On February 24, 2025, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs put out a Press Release accusing Brodie of “racist residential school denialism” and asked her to apologize.
This demand perhaps prompted a press conference that day, where the leader of the B.C. Conservative Party, John Rustad, said that he had asked Brodie to take the post down.
Conservative MLA Peter Milobar then made a number of comments in the Legislative Assembly on February 25, 2025 under the auspices of pushing back against “residential school denialism”.
One of the reasons why debate is so impoverished on the question of “potential” graves in the old apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School – graves that would have to be clandestine, as this was not an abandoned cemetery like many other cases – is because of the intimidation that has been occurring in the universities for about ten years. One of the main sources of intimidation is Sean Carleton, an indigenous studies professor at the University of Manitoba. Beginning in May 2020, Carleton began smearing anyone who questioned his views about the residential schools as a “residential school denialist”. This was an attempt to equate questioning whether the residential schools were genocidal with being a holocaust denier.
In the Dallas Brodie controversy, Sean Carleton is at it again.
