“Mass Graves”: The Liberal Libel That Trudeau Can’t Erase

They’re all regrettable, but none more so than Trudeau’s heel turn on “mass graves” at residential schools that he turned into a genocidal screed against Canada at the UN. This revolting performance, replete with Trudeau carrying a teddy bear into an alleged murder scene in BC, may be the greatest disgrace ever perpetrated in the name of a Canadian prime minister.

Bulletin: Sir John A. Macdonald name will remain on Calgary school despite reconciliation controversy: board Students at the school were calling on the board to change the name after questions were raised about the land near a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

The federal Liberal party has absconded to Halifax this week for what they’re describing as a policy retreat. This should be good news for Canadians who want Justin Trudeau’s midwits to retreat from many of the policies they’ve adopted since 2015. But I suspect they mean something different. As always.

The prime minister, who’s polling just above scrofula in Canadian approval, has vowed he will lead his party till the last possible second before he must call an election in 2025. And, he hallucinates, he’ll still be PM after Canada has had its say. Appropriate since the entire Trudeau experience has gotten to be a bad drug trip.

To distract from the utter catastrophe of his term, Trudeau is shuffling policy deck chairs and employing his daft cabinet to spend more money that won’t be paid off till 2124. Hardly a surprise, as the record he must defend has so many bodies buried beneath the chaos of DEI, CRT, ESG and the many other blights he’s perpetrated.

They’re all regrettable, but none more so than Trudeau’s heel turn on “mass graves” at residential schools that he turned into a genocidal screed against Canada at the UN. This revolting performance, replete with Trudeau carrying a teddy bear into an alleged murder scene in BC, may be the greatest disgrace ever perpetrated in the name of a Canadian prime minister. One pretending to be Alladin.

The manufactured hype— readily digested by his Canadian media water carriers— served as a bragging point in the hastily called election of 2021, in which Trudeau was denied a majority and fell into the arms of an NDP embrace. An embrace that will continue till the 2025 writ is dropped.

Making it worse, no evidence of murder or malfeasance has ever emerged to support the blood libel embraced by Trudeau. The few excavations since have turned up nothing and have quickly been forgotten by Trudeau, Singh and the media. Here’s how we covered the media’s unhinged performance at the height of its insanity prior to the election.

“The suddenly uncovered “mass graves” (sudden to them at least) were proof of denying the past. Woke Toronto journalists competed for who could damn the killers of the Rez kids, who’d supposedly been murdered and dumped in shallow graves behind the school at midnight.

David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer writing in the Globe and Mail, claimed “The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools…looks and smells like criminal activity.” Activist firebrand Robert Jago said anyone questioning the validity of his own genocide allegations should be considered equivalent to “Holocaust denial” and punished as a hate-speech purveyor.

International media— pumped by Canadian activists— jumped at the story, too. Here’s the UK Independent headlining “mass graves” being discovered and hinting darkly that TB deaths at rez schools weren’t accidental.

Just one problem. The 751 graves in Saskatchewan are well known and may contain white families, too, says Cowessess First Nation band member Irene Andreas . “There is no ‘discovery’ of graves. We buried our dead with a proper funeral. Then we allowed them to Rest In Peace…To assume that foul play took place would be premature and unsupported.

“All (our) elders have knowledge of every grave. The Band office has records from the Bishop’s office, the Church board and from cemetery workers who were in charge of digging graves and burials… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”

In his brilliant analysis of the evidence that Trudeau and Singh hype, Hymie Rubenstein (who taught and wrote about Indigenous and other cultures at the University of Manitoba for 31 years) says there has never been verified proof of even a single child killed in the century-plus the residential schools operated. No name, no body, no second-hand witnesses.

Furthermore, the sobering death rates of Rez children were in line with the mortality rates for children from all causes in the years the schools were employed from 1870-2000 . (Researchers found that all the Alberta native children waiting for entrance into residential schools in 1912 carried TB.)

As for the charge of secretive burials, children who attended the schools testified to having attended Christian burials for children who died. There was no disrespect in their burials. On the the issue of “unmarked graves’, native bands rarely marked graves after mourning the dead both young and old. That’s if they marked them at all.

Chief Joe Pierre of the Paq’am in Cranbrook, explained, “Graves were traditionally marked with wooden crosses and this practice continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada. Wooden crosses can deteriorate over time due to erosion or fire which can result in an unmarked grave.”

No matter. Trudeau is happy to foment international rage against the Church and the politicians of the day if it helps him get re-elected in September. His teddy-bear stunt served to deflect from his abject failure on the indigenous-peoples file and his high-profile firing of Kwak’wala member Jody Wilson Raybould as his justice minister. As always he knew a sympathetically curated media lie would be around the world before the facts (in Churchill’s words) could ever get their pants on. His purchased press would see to that.

The man who wants another mandate as PM so he can vilify Canada to the world has plenty of political cover. The NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, the bespoke socialist, visited the Saskatchewan cemetery to claim, “This is a crime of genocide, the worst crime possible. And what we need to do is prosecute it like a crime.” Looking to create an election issue he demanded an independent prosecutor.

There is bad news for Singh’s pandering demand that charges be laid now using modern ground-penetrating technology. Kisha Supernant of the University of Alberta explained to the National Post, “What the ground-penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave.” But bodies or evidence of foul play? As Supernant notes, the technology “doesn’t actually see the bodies (or coffins). It’s not like an X-ray.”

The final and most damning charge levelled by Trudeau and the radicals against their own nation is that of genocide. That from 1867- present Canada conceived and perpetrated a slaughter on the order of the Nazi Holocaust (1940-45) or the Armenian massacre (1915-17) or the Rwandan mass killing of Tutsis (1994). Despite the fervent support of progressive media they have fallen short.

According to the UN Convention’s formal post-1948 commentary, “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, in 2015, tried hard to equate the treatment of natives in residential schools with genocide, before settling for the legally inert term cultural genocide, one Trudeau, Singh and the Canada haters immediately abridged to genocide.

While that has spurred radicals to destroy the name and statues to Sir John A. Macdonald, the facts don’t support a charge of genocide against him and successive government. As Rubenstein points out, “Macdonald quadrupled Ottawa’s native budget to deal with the crippling Western famine in the early 1880s. This event was caused by the collapse of the Prairie bison herds, an outcome over which Canada had absolutely no control; nonetheless, Macdonald mustered substantial government resources to meet the challenge.

“Consider also that Ottawa successfully vaccinated almost the entire native community against smallpox at great expense and effort, virtually wiping out this highly contagious killer among a people with no natural immunity to the disease.” Hardly sounds like the actions of a government intent on genocide.

Certainly the pain and tragedy felt by many Rez school children was real. And their treatment in regards to cultural and language issues, in the fullness of time, looks unacceptable by today’s standards. Like the 100,000 British Home Children shipped to Canada in the same era to work as indentured slaves to farmers and others… It is a period we devoutly wish we had to do over again.

But the memories of those children are stained by the self-serving political theatrics of today’s politicians who seek to run a country they’re spent years denigrating to the world.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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A Decade Later, The Picture That Launched A Thousand Ships To The West

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A Decade Later, The Picture That Launched A Thousand Ships To The West

Published on October 3, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

Nine years after September 2, 2015 the image is still searing. A little Syrian boy in shorts and a t-shirt washed up on a Turkish beach after his father’s boat capsized during a panicked escape from the civil war in their country. If you had a shred of humanity you probably resolved to do something about it. You vowed to help these desperate people.

So you unwittingly elected radicals and social engineers to the highest offices in the nations, trusting that their honeyed words about Aylan Kurdi’s sacrifice would not go to waste. What you didn’t know is your tears for a tiny lad would be re-purposed by radicals into an immigrant culture washing over Western culture. Is it correlation or causation? At this point it doesn’t matter.

There are many factors at play, but you could do worse than look at that dead boy as Patient One in the fever gripping the elites of Canada, the U.S. and the EU. While you can argue about previous conditions in Syria and the Middle East, the photo is Day One in the obliteration of Western traditional society.

It certainly contributed to the downfall of PM Stephen Harper, who was holding his own in the 2015 federal election until the Syrian war spit out that desperate family, the family that was taken down by the waves. Looking to be taken seriously in his battle for PM, Justin Trudeau used the Syrian crisis to flail Harper’s cold-hearted approach to the refugees.

For a PM whose warmth was never a strong point, Trudeau’s exploitation of the drowned little boy hit with the Liberal’s burgeoning base of white suburban women (and men who want to sleep with them). As we wrote in September of 2015: “If the campaign has had a moment where blood pressure crested, even briefly, it was in the visceral reaction to the drowned Syrian boy. The heartbreaking photo provoked an authentically Canadian dismay and a completely disproportionate response to the gravity of his desperate personal quest.

Even flinty Post columnist Christie Blatchford was advocating open borders to assuage first-world guilt over the Syrian mess.” Before you could say Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris, the doors to Europe and North America were indiscriminately opened to penniless refugees, to the worst criminals the third world produces, to the most extreme Marxist revolutionaries, to climate-change fanatics. The pillars of western thought, built over two thousand years, are disintegrating as those immigrants (legal or otherwise) clog the streets with the politics and religions they supposedly left behind.

When a newly-elected Donald Trump sought in 2017 to limit immigration from nations with radical politics he was met with a banshee wail from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times. Still smarting from Trump’s election they branded him a racist, a stain that follows him till today.

Making it doubly exasperating was the fact that these interlopers were not what the public had voted for. A succession of progressive politicians such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh repurposed a geopolitical tragedy, diluting the traditional population with immigrants who neither care for nor respect their adopted homes. (Hands up anyone who’s heard these demonstrators with a good word about Canada or the U.S.)

The impact of this seemingly virtuous immigration touches every corner of Western societies. Having open borders is misconstrued as being open minded. It was argued again in the U.S. vice presidential debate on Oct. 1 with Democrat Tim Walz and his CBS News allies bizarrely insisting that the newcomers haven’t made housing more expensive. GOP nominee J.D. Vance countered that the surge of buyers was a supply/ demand driver for home-price inflation. The fact this was even debatable underscores how deep the rot has become.

From housing to education to healthcare, the ballooning of Canada’s population from 35 million to 40 million ignores the reality that makes citizens feel like strangers in their own land. While the moribund Liberal/ NDP axis and their paid media still embrace the flood of illegal aliens, polls show that most Canadians agree with the CPC’s stand that the saturation point was surpassed a long time ago.

The impact was similar in Europe where the attempts to staunch the flow of refugees looking for a toehold in the generous EU turned into a raging flood. Anyone asking to slow down the process was accused of wanting more Aylan Kurdis. Landing on all manner of craft in southern Europe the refugees made their way north to the embrace of health benefits and income guarantees. By the end of the decade all the major cities in the EU were penetrated by ghettos of aliens seeking to recreate their previous Damascus home in Stockholm or Paris or Brussels.

The clash of cultures produced horrific results that those who’d invited the strangers into their homes were reluctant to admit. Stories of grooming white girls in Bradford, England, or attacking outsiders who wandered into Malmo, Sweden, were dismissed and, now, punished by new anti-hate legislation. Those who cared in 2015 are now finally realizing the impact of using Aylun Kurdi to satisfy their liberal guilt has been a disaster for their culture.

It is said that a week is a long time in politics. In this case a decade has been more than enough to bring Western Civilization to its knees.

Bruce Dowbiggin

Rogers Buys Out Bell In MLSE Shakeup: What Does It Mean For Fans?

Published on October 1, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

There is an old joke that Canada has two seasons. Summer. And the months when the Toronto Maple Leafs lead the nightly Canadian sports networks. Perhaps it’s not that bad, but for those who don’t live in southern Ontario it often feels that way.

The reason, some said, for this Buds obsession was that both TSN and Rogers Sportsnet were part owners of the team through Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, a business giant created in 2011 when the warring telcos took equal percentage shares in MLSE (Larry Tanenebaum took the final 25 percent, now 20 percent after selling a share to The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.)

At the time the merger of Bell (TSN) and Sportsnet (Rogers) was compared to Twitter and Facebook deciding to partner. Such was the rivalry that many predicted it wouldn’t last. But it did—if you don’t include Stanley Cups. Until this past week when it was announced that, if approved, Rogers will buy out Bell’s stake in MLSE, leaving it with 75 percent ownership. The process should close next year.

Rogers also has an option to buy out Tanenbaum next year, giving it complete control of the Leafs, Raptors, Argos (CFL), Toronto FC (MLS) and Toronto’s ScotiaBank Centre, among other baubles. (The new Toronto WNBA team is owned by Tannenbaum and several partners.)

Why the deal? Why now? Despite the huge national audience for the NHL, NBA and MLB, the component parts are said to be underperforming in a time when equity in sports franchises is soaring. Rogers’ national NHL TV contract is a significant drain on revenues. The Blue Jays’ flopping in the standings has left them a “stranded money-losing team” whose value isn’t fully reflected within Rogers. The Raptors are now also-rans.

Bell’s debt rating was downgraded to one notch above junk in August by Moody’s Investors Service. While not to the point of selling pencils there’s a thought that packaged as a group under one owner, the teams will now be more lucrative and, possibly, lead to an IPO in the future.

What does it mean for sports fans? For now, not much change. TSN is getting a 20-year agreement to get 50 percent of the regular-season Leafs and Raptors games. So it will have an NHL/ NBA presence until April. (It also has regional Montreal Canadiens rights.) TSN also has a strong NFL, tennis and golf presence. Rogers will have the existing property rights for the NHL playoffs as well as regional interests in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Plus its existing monopoly on the Blue Jays broadcasts.

Bell is reportedly interested in cutting its property inventory and concentrating on “5G, cloud and enterprise solutions”. TSN says it remains the prime media backer of the CFL, even though it no longer has an ownership position. Mediocre Toronto FC remain an add-on with a niche audience. As NHL national rights holder, Sportsnet (using CBC as a cutout) will still be the major outlet for postseason hockey. It’s also the exclusive home of the Blue Jays and the MLB postseason.

What does it mean in business terms? Despite the apparent cordiality of the deal, there is a fly in the ointment should digital companies such as Amazon, Prime, Apple, YouTube or Disney decide to bid on the primo national NHL broadcast rights packages. Already big leagues such as NFL, MLB and NBA have hived off packages to these outfits. Could they drive the price past Rogers’ comfort zone?

All this begs the question of what happens to the Raptors, Argos and Toronto FC which have fallen from their hip status of years prior. It’s well known that Rogers execs aren’t fond of Raptors president/ GM Masai Ujiri. Will they get the love in the C suite to bid on the top basketball contracts? Ditto Toronto FC, a pet project of Tanenbaum’s. It competes nationally with other Canadian teams. Will it have an ally in the front office?

If there is an ally it will have to be the peripatetic new CEO Keith Pelley who returns to Canada from running the European PGA Tour after stints running TSN, Rogers Sportsnet, the 2010 Winter Olympics and the Toronto Argos. Pelley knows all the broadcast and sports players firsthand from his prior gigs. He’s seen as an innovator but he also has good friends in the traditional sports leagues.

The one certainty is that cable and satellite packages will not decrease in price. Nor will ticket prices as pro sports continues to stretch the boundaries on how much people will pay for tickets (still a key revenue for NHL owners). And, for those wondering, the chances of leading newscasts with a Maple Leafs practice will be remain very strong for the future.