Before 2015, accusations of “genocide” perpetrated against aboriginal people in Canada have been few and far between. One of the first appeared in 1994 in a submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples – The Circle Game by Roland D. Chrisjohn and Sherri L. Young. This submission argued that assimilation was genocide.
The second major source was Kevin Annett. In 2006, Annett produced a “documentary” with the title “Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide”.
“Unrepentant” has been unexpectantly influential. According to Nina Green, it resulted in Liberal Member of Parliament Gary Merasty sending an inquiry to Jim Prentice, Minister of Indian Affairs. Merasty asked Prentice to look into “concerns” that had been expressed by Kevin Annett.
Green notes that this resulted in Prentice setting up a working group on “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials” headed by Robert Watts, who had formerly been the Chief of Staff for the Assembly of First Nations. Watts then became the first Interim Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Because the working group’s recommendations were accepted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Annett’s allegations about “missing children” were incorporated into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s research. For a number of years, Annett had been claiming that 50,000 children had died in the schools.
In Green’s article, she documents how Annett’s claims about thousands of missing chldren were absorbed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in spite of the fact that an investigation of criminal acts was “contrary to the TRC’s mandate”:
In 2015, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report was released, Murray Sinclair did not state that the residential schools constituted “genocide”. Instead, he referred to the schools as “cultural genocide”, which is a concept that was specifically excluded from the United Nations’ genocide convention.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that the government initiate a national inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women, and this was formed in 2016. The Report, released in 2019, asserted that the murdered and missing constituted a “genocide”. This finding was not immediately accepted by Prime Minister Trudeau, but was embraced a day later.
The Inquiry commissioned a specific report on the allegation of “genocide”. The report was authored by Fannie Lafontaine and Amanda Ghahremani and asserted that missing and murdered indigenous women constituted a different kind of genocide – a kind of genocide that was linked to colonialism – that had occurred over hundreds of years.
At the time, however, there was significant pushback about the assertion that genocide in Canada had occurred.
This led me to be optimistic about the future of open inquiry at Mount Royal University.
This declaration of “genocide” by a government appointed entity led numerous aboriginal activists to assert that this must be accepted a number of months later. The word “denial” was used to label those who were skeptical of the claim.
This reference to “denial” was an attempt to equate those who challenged that the residential schools were genocidal with holocaust deniers. This resulted in Lynn Beyak being castigated and eventually purged from the Senate for saying that many who ran the schools had good intentions. In the Winter of 2020, Mount Royal University professor Sean Carleton (who moved to the University of Manitoba in the Fall of 2020) began to use the term “residential school denialism”.
Perhaps because of Carleton’s influence on the poisoning of the academic environment at Mount Royal University, General Faculties Council voted in September 2020 that the residential schools were genocidal.
The announcement of the false claim that the “remains of 215 children” had been “confirmed” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School gave tremendous momentum to the allegation that the residential schools were genocidal, as it was assumed that hundreds of children had been murdered. This was the view of the MRU professor who had instigated the mobbing campaign against me, Gabrielle Lindstrom (who now goes by her maiden name Gabrielle Weasel Head). Shortly after the Kamloops Indian Band’s announcement on May 27, 2021, she posted this:
Because of the hysteria that was unfolding, Tim Rahilly, the President of MRU, released a video on the “heartbreaking discovery of 215 children buried in unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School” on June 4, 2021.
As a result, Leah Gazan, the MP for Winnipeg Centre, pressed for a motion declaring that the residential schools were “genocidal”. She provided this introduction to what she was intending on June 9, 2021.
This motion did not receive unanimous consent and so it was defeated. Gazan castigated those who had denied consent.
In July 2022, when Pope Francis visited Canada, he was asked a question on the plane back to Rome and asserted that the residential schools constituted genocide.
This led Leah Gazan to make another attempt to have the motion on genocide receive unanimous consent. This time she was successful in October 2022.
This has led Gazan to now propose legislation to criminalize those who “deny” the “genocidal” nature of residential schools in September 2024.
Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor on unmarked graves, also argued that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized in her report, which was released at the end of 2024.
The federal election caused Leah Gazan’s Bill-413 to die on the order paper, but she reintroduced the legislation in October 2025. In introducing her bill, she talked about the “increase in denialism” that had occurred “since the discovery of unmarked graves”.
The idea that Canada committed genocide against aboriginal people is linked to the idea, fomented by the falsifier of history Kevin Annett, that there are thousands of “missing children” (when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not been able to provide one name of a child who “disappeared”). This has led Nina Green to argue that three things must be done to correct the record:
