Free Republic

A hoax costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and incites arson attacks against dozens of churches. This time, however, it’s not the latest headline out of Minnesota — look a little further north. In 2021, at a time when media throughout the western world were still in a state of high agitation after the killing of George Floyd, Canadian outlets picked up on a story too sensational not to be true. Hundreds of indigenous First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia.

Long before Stephen Harper’s Conservative government launched the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007, it was already commonplace to refer to the legacy of those schools as a “dark chapter in Canadian history.” There was much that was dark about the schools. Many of the church-run, federally-administered institutions, whatever the good intentions of the religious orders that ran them, were dark and forbidding places that incubated disease, cultural dislocation, abuse and despair, for much of their history. Roughly 150,000 children are believed to have attended the schools, which the federal government...