On December 17, 2025, the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre, Leah Gazan, gave some examples of what she asserts is “residential school denialism”. These constitute the following: “books like “The Grave Hoax” by Tom Flanagan, [which constitutes the] mass spreading of disinformation, [and] mass spreading of denialism…”; “having people go in the middle of the night to try and dig up unmarked graves around the Kamloops Residential School, that is pretty violent”; and “we’re seeing more of that [violent] behaviour [with] Widdowson, Frances Widdowson, who was just arrested in BC for her spreading of residential school denialism”.
The book referred to by Leah Gazan is “Grave Error” (not “The Grave Hoax”), which is *edited* by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan.
Nine chapters from the Table of Contents for the book are posted below. Gazan has never specified the “disinformation” to which she refers.
As for the second “example” of “denialism” – “having people go in the middle of the night to try and dig up unmarked graves around the Kamloops Residential School” – this was uncritically reported by Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves.
According to Mel Rothenburger, a former Mayor of Kamloops, Kimberly Murray was told this by Rosanne Casimir at the January 2023 Gathering on Unmarked Burials.
It is not clear at what point in the gathering in January 2023 that Kimberly Murray was told this, as there is no video of a Casimir presentation at this venue. The only recorded interaction is Murray thanking Casimir “on behalf of all of Canada…for bringing these atrocities to light at the scale that you did with your community”. This was a year and a half AFTER Sarah Beaulieu had stated that GPR could not detect burials and only excavations could confirm the existence of remains.
The scenario about the person/people with a shovel or shovels is highly improbable because it was not reported to the police by the Kamloops Indian Band at the time
As Widdowson knows from personal experience, since security threatened to call police and then photographed her license plate when she was taking a photograph of a sign outside the area of contemplation in broad daylight, the Kamloops Indian Band would certainly have done this with respect to intruders in the middle of the night.
The story also has changed numerous times. While Casimir evidently told Murray about people with shovels, Casimir then referred to one person who “showed up with a shovel in hand”.
Then, at the gathering of the Special Interlocutor in October 2025, Casimir stated that there was not a single person, but a “couple”, who showed up in the middle of the night with shovels:
The story of “showing up in the middle of the night with shovels” was unquestioningly recounted by Sean Carleton in the APTN program “Dismantling Denialism”. What was the evidence that APTN provided for this? A video where Widdowson used a shovel as a prop to stress the importance of excavations. APTN used a picture from this video to imply that Widdowson was one of the people who showed up on the site demanding that bodies be dug up.
With respect to Gazan’s third example – the fact that Widdowson “was just arrested in BC for her spreading of residential school denialism” – even the most rudimentary facts are wrong. Widdowson was arrested because she refused to leave the property. This was due to the fact that the university had falsely claimed that she was coming to the university “for the purpose of a public talk”, which had not been “submitted through [UVic’s] booking processes”. Then, on December 2, 2025, it was stated that Widdowson’s “conduct on university property is contrary to university policy expectations”, which, it was implied, was that she failed “to assume responsibility for [her] actions, ensure lawful personal conduct, and respect the rights, privileges, and safety of others”.
In terms of Widdowson’s “denialism”, she arrived on campus with a sandwich board with two questions “What Remains [have been confirmed at the Kamloops site]? and “Denial or Truth [whether Dallas Brodie’s claim about “zero bodies” constituted “denialism”]?
When Widdowson was arrested, there was a completely chaotic scene because challenging the false claim about the “remains of 215 children” being “confirmed” is no longer possible at the University of Victoria.
In spite of the fact that even the Kamloops Indian Band changed the wording from “remains” to “anomalies” in 2024, Gazan was still talking about “the discovery of the 215 children in unmarked graves in Kamloops” in January 2025.
As there is no evidence for the remains of children being found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, and it is highly improbable that this is the case as not one parent has said their child never came home, it is Gazan who is spreading “misinformation” about the residential schools. In spite of this, however, in October 2025 Gazan reintroduced a Bill to criminalize trying to correct the record about this false claim. This is totalitarianism.
To combat these increasing efforts to suppress the truth, Widdowson will continue to travel to universities to ask questions and engage in discussions about the Kamloops case. Her next stop will be the University of British Columbia on January 22, 2026. The question is whether Dr. Gage Averill, the Provost and Vice-President, Academic, will allow the discussions to proceed, or whether UBC will be another entrant into the Universities Hall of Shame.
