On June 29, 2026, an interview took place on “Front Burner” about “What’s fuelling residential school denialism?”
In this discussion, Markusoff directly mentioned Frances Widdowson (at 15:04)
This led Widdowson to write to Markusoff
The first point in the discussion is that holocaust denial is illegal, and so “residential school denialism” criminalization would address the the “legal imbalance”. Nigaan Sinclair states (at 3:57):
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Carleton is asked about what constitutes residential school denialism (at 5:32).
Niigaan Sinclair argues that hate speech laws won’t cover it off, because there has been a normalization of hating aboriginal peoples and existing laws do a poor job of protecting marginalized people. Carleton also adds (at 9:51):
Sean Carleton (at 12:43) asserts that “Many of these arguments [of residential school denialism] have been used from the beginning of the system to justify its ongoing operation, to downplay or dismiss critiques by students or parents or community leaders”.
Niigaan Sinclair (at 14:43) states that “residential school denialism” is going to decline because “as younger people take over, there is a fluency about not just Indigenous history, but Canadian history, because that’s what residential school history is, it’s a Canadian history, that young people understand this more than ever, and they just simply won’t tolerate people who want to say that there’s fire in a theatre when there’s no fire, they just won’t tolerate it”
At 17:01, Sean Carleton states “In fact, if we are stuck in debating the substance, their ideas, we’ve already lost, because they try and entrap you, right, as if it’s a reasonable debate, as if it’s a reasonable discussion, just like Holocaust denialism. If you’re debating whether Zilcon B was used in gas chambers or not, you’ve already become entrapped in the web of Holocaust denialism”.
At 18:16, Niigaan Sinclair continues with the holocaust denial analogy:
The Kamloops case is mentioned, about how the story has changed from remains to anomalies. At 20:54, Sean Carleton states
This leads Markusoff to reply (at 23:25) that it was the Kamloops claim, not the TRC Report, that resulted in an outpouring of emotion?
Which leads Niigaan Sinclair to provide the following:
This leads Jason Markusoff (at 28:06) to point out that
This leads Niigaan Sinclair to reply
