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Despite claims of 215 ‘unmarked graves,’ no bodies have been found at Canadian residential school

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized since the Trudeau government and mainstream media promulgated, without any physical evidence, the narrative that mass ‘unmarked graves’ had been discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has confirmed it has spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a now-closed residential school once run by the Catholic Church, despite the fact that no human remains have been found.

In total, some $7.9 million was earmarked for a search of unmarked Indian Residential School graves in Kamloops, British Columbia. According to the spokeswoman for the Crown-Indigenous Relations, Carolane Gratton, the community got the money “for field work, records searches and to secure the Residential School grounds.”

“Details of initiatives taken by Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation are best directed to the community,” noted Gratton. 

To date, the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has not given a financial accounting under the Access To Information Act as to where the money went. According to the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, it “continues to grieve children that are in our care and are focused on the scientific work that needs to be done,” but made no mention of the $7.9 million. 

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools. 

The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021, when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence, but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar. 

The money given to the First Nation was done so to find the “heartbreaking truth” of the residential school system, according to a 2022 Indian Residential School Sites: Unmarked Burials department briefing note.  

“Our thoughts are with survivors, their families and communities as the heartbreaking truth about Residential Schools’ unmarked burials continues to be unveiled,” read the note.  

“Funding is available to support communities, survivors and their families on their healing journey through researching, locating and memorializing those children who died while attending Indian Residential Schools.” 

While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the past wrongs led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, which boiled over in the summer of 2021 after the discovery of the 215 so-called “unmarked” graves in Kamloops.

While some children did die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children tragically passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to the federal government, not the Catholic Church, failing to properly fund the system.   

No human remains have been found 

Soon after the Kamloops announcement in 2021, other regions claimed the presence of “unmarked graves,” which prompted Canada’s House of Commons under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with the help of all other parties including the Conservatives, to declare the residential school program a “genocide” despite the lack of evidence.

The reality is that to date, no human remains have been found at the Kamloops site or other sites.

In fact, in August 2023, the Pine Creek Residential School, located in Pine Creek, Manitoba, underwent a four-week excavation and yielded no remains. 

The excavation was led by a First Nation’s tribe called Minegoziibe Ashinabe, and came after a total of 14 abnormalities were found at the former school by ground-penetrating radar.  

There have been other excavations conducted at residential schools that have likewise turned up no human remains.  

Since the spring of 2021, over 100 churches, mostly Catholic, have been burned or vandalized across Canada. The attacks on the churches came shortly after the “unmarked graves” narrative began.

Despite the church burnings, the federal government under Trudeau has done nothing substantial to bring those responsible to justice or to stem the root cause of the burnings. 

“I think Canadians have seen with horror those unmarked graves across the country and realize that what happened decades ago isn’t part of our history, it is an irrefutable part of our present,” Trudeau had earlier remarked to reporters.  

The unmarked graves controversy also spurred a Senate committee in 2023 to claim that anyone who questions the graves is engaged in “Residential School denialism.” 

“Denialism serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials and unmarked graves,” said a Senate Indigenous peoples committee report titled Honouring The Children Who Never Came Home.  

The Senate committee report said that the Canadian government should “take every action necessary to combat the rise of Residential School denialism.” 

Jordan Peterson tells Pope Francis to ‘take note’ 

Responding to reports about the Trudeau government spending nearly $8 million without finding a single body, renowned anti-woke Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson took a shot at Pope Francis.

“Pope Francis take note @Pontifex,” wrote Peterson on X (formerly Twitter) last Thursday. 

Peterson’s remarks likely came in light of the fact that Francis visited Canada in the summer of 2022 for the purpose of apologizing for churchmen’s role in the operation of the residential school program.  

During his July 2022 trip, Francis visited First Nations in Alberta and Quebec. While in Quebec, he seemed to join in on a pagan “smudging” ritual before giving a lengthy speech where he conveyed “deep shame and sorrow” for the role played by Catholic Church members in government-funded residential school abuses.  

While Francis seemed to go along with the mainstream narrative regarding residential schools, others have spoken out.

Last year, retired Bishop of Calgary, Frederick Henry, blasted the blatant “lie” that thousands of missing indigenous children who attended residential schools run by the Catholic Church were somehow “clandestinely” murdered by “Catholic priests and nuns.”

The founder of the National Post, Conrad Black, also made similar statements as Henry in an opinion piece for his former paper, calling the entire narrative a “fraud.” 

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Business

Budget 2025 continues to balloon spending and debt

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By Franco Terrazzano 

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is criticizing Prime Minister Mark Carney for ballooning spending and debt in Budget 2025.

“Budget 2025 shows the debt continues to spiral out of control because spending continues to spiral out of control,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Carney needs to reverse course to get debt and spending under control because every dollar Canadians pay in federal sales tax is already going to pay interest charges on the debt.

“Carney isn’t close to balancing anything when he’s borrowing tens of billions of dollars every year.”

The federal deficit will increase significantly this year to $78.3 billion. There is no plan to balance the budget and stop borrowing money. The federal debt will reach $1.35 trillion by the end of this year.

Debt interest charges will cost taxpayers $55.6 billion this year, which is more than the federal government will send to the provinces in health transfers ($54.7 billion) or collect through the GST ($54.4 billion).

Budget 2025 increases spending by $38 billion this year to $581 billion. Despite promises to control spending in future years, Budget 2025 projects that overall spending will continue to rise by billions every year.

“Canadians don’t need another plan to create a plan to meet about cutting spending, Canadians need real spending cuts now,” Terrazzano said. “The government always tells Canadians that it will go on a diet Monday, but Monday never comes.

“And the government isn’t really finding savings if it’s planning to keep increasing spending every year.”

Budget 2025 commits to “strengthening” the industrial carbon tax and “setting a multi-decade industrial carbon price trajectory that targets net zero by 2050.”

“Carney’s hidden carbon tax will make it harder for Canadian businesses to compete and will push Canadian entrepreneurs to set up shop south of the border,” Terrazzano said. “Carney should scrap all carbon taxes, cut spending and stop taking so much money from taxpayers.”

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Business

Federal budget: Carney government posts largest deficit in Canadian history outside pandemic

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  • Federal deficit projected to exceed $78 billion

  • This is Ottawa’s tenth consecutive unbalanced budget

  • Every newborn baby in Canada now enters the world with a debt of more than $33,000.

Repackaging record spending as “investments” while offering no credible path back to balance is the opposite of responsible fiscal stewardship, asserts the MEI in response to the tabling of the federal budget this afternoon.

“Canadians should find a deficit this large extremely troubling,” says Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI. “The attempt to disguise it under a new wave of so-called investments makes it even more concerning.

“It’s one thing to spend money you don’t have; it’s yet another to shirk responsibility for it.”

The Carney government is projecting a deficit of $78.3 billion for 2025-2026, up from $48.3 billion last year.

Interest payments are projected to rise to $55.6 billion this upcoming fiscal year, but servicing the debt will mount rapidly: to $76.1 billion by 2030, a 37 per cent spike.

Current debt charges cost taxpayers more than federal healthcare transfers to provinces, which amount to $54 billion annually.

This budget deficit would bring the national debt to $1.48 trillion, and mark the tenth consecutive year without a balanced federal budget. Every newborn baby in Canada now enters the world with a debt of more than $33,000.

Much of the new spending is categorized as capital as opposed to operational, which is a new reclassification scheme unveiled by the Carney government that does nothing to change the total debt. The government’s net debt is predicted to grow by another 21 per cent by 2030, to $1.79 trillion.

The Build Canada Homes program, for one, has an initial $13-billion price tag. The MEI studied a similar program launched in New Zealand, which accomplished just 3 per cent of its total objective.

The MEI warns that this marks a shift toward increased central planning, with Canada becoming an economy where politicians, instead of businesses and consumers, decide which industries succeed.

Overtures in the budget hint at a possible future walk-back of the emissions cap, which the think tank has strongly advocated for. In March, the PBO released a report estimating that the emissions cap would reduce our collective prosperity by $20.5 billion in 2032 and result in 40,300 fewer jobs than there would otherwise be.

A clearer path toward shrinking the federal bureaucracy has been laid out, with the government planning to eliminate 16,000 full-time positions, representing 4.5 per cent of the workforce as of March 2025.

Economist Emmanuelle B. Faubert would like the government to go further. While Ottawa plans to maintain the size of the federal bureaucracy at about 330,000 employees by 2028-29 through attrition, the MEI sees this as insufficient, and urged a more ambitious approach in its pre-budget submission.

The MEI recommended cutting the federal workforce by 17.4 per cent, mirroring the Chrétien-era reductions of the 1990s, which would eliminate roughly 64,000 positions and save taxpayers $10 billion annually.

The MEI welcomes the decision to expand capital cost allowances, letting businesses write off new machinery and equipment more quickly. This measure promotes investment and productivity by reducing the upfront cost of doing business.

“The government may try to rebrand its debt, but Canadians will still be the ones paying it off for decades,” says Ms. Faubert. “Carney calls it a generational budget, and he’s right, but only because future generations will be stuck footing the bill.”

* * *

The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.

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