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Retired judge slams Trudeau gov’t for promoting ‘false’ accusation about residential school deaths
Retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht
From LifeSiteNews
Retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht observed that allegations were made with ‘no real evidence’ and that reports ‘that thousands of indigenous children had died at residential schools under suspicious circumstances’ are patently ‘false.’
A retired Canadian judge blasted what he said is a “conspiracy theory” lie and “shocking” yet unproven “accusation” being pushed by the Liberal federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and legacy media that thousands of Indigenous residential school kids died due to negligence by the Catholic priests and nuns.
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accused Canadian priests, nuns, teachers, and staff at residential schools of somehow being responsible for the disappearance of thousands of indigenous children who attended the schools. That is a shocking accusation,” retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht wrote in a commentary piece published in the Western Standard last week.
“But it is even more shocking that the accusation was made with no real evidence to support it.”
Giesbrecht observed that reports from TRC commissioners that “that thousands of indigenous children had died at residential schools under suspicious circumstances” are patently “false.”
“Those allegations were false, and based on a conspiracy theory,” Giesbrecht said.
The judge lamented the fact that hundreds of Christian (mostly Catholic) churches have been burned to the ground since the first TRC report came out in 2010, with more than 100 being reduced to ashes since 2021.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media and federal government 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 First Nation now has changed its claim of 215 graves to 200 “potential burials.”
Giesbrecht wrote that the fires “increased significantly after the May 27, 2021, Kamloops announcement ramped up that claim to an actual accusation by the Tk’emlups Indian band that 215 children had died under sinister circumstances and were buried by priests in secrecy on the school grounds.
“Where did that Tk’emlups story come from? Most importantly, why would anyone believe such obvious nonsense?” he wrote.
According to Giesbrecht, the “conspiracy theory that launched the entire missing children claim” came from a “largely created” claim by defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett.
“For reasons that defy rational explanation this unusual man made it his life’s work to take the alcoholic ramblings of a few Vancouvers east side street residents, polish them up, and present them as fact to the world,” the retired justice wrote.
Giesbrecht gave an example of how Annett repeated the story that “Queen Elizabeth had kidnapped 10 children from the Kamloops school, and those children were never seen again,” but was later exposed by an investigative reporter.
According to Giesbrecht, Annett “repeated stories about priests clubbing students to death and throwing them into graves dug by other students, dead boys hanging on meat hooks in barns, and babies thrown into furnaces by priests and nuns.”
“Respected investigative reporter Terry Glavin exposed Annett as a crank and debunked Annett’s wild stories in detail in a 2008 Tyee article. Annett’s stories are so obviously fake that it seems incredible that anyone believed them,” he said.
Giesbrecht noted that it is “hard” to believe that anyone thought the defrocked pastor’s tales were true, but the truth is, people “did” fall for it.
“In fact, some of the people who fell for these stories occupied important positions. One was Gary Merasty, a Member of Parliament. Merasty became so convinced that these claims, as presented in Kevin Annett’s most famous documentary, ‘Unrepentant’ were true, that he was able to convince the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and other important politicians that the newly appointed TRC commissioners must investigate Annett’s claims,” he said.
According to Giesbrecht, the newly appointed TRC commissioners had “unwisely accepted this new area of study, despite the fact that they had no mandate to do so.”
“When the federal government refused their request for a mandate and funds to search for these phantom ‘missing children’ they ignored the rebuff, and pursued the subject anyway,” he wrote.
“It appears from their statements on the subject that they completely bought into the Annett conspiracy theory. Commissioner Murray Sinclair gave many interviews about these supposedly “missing children” and hinted frequently that dark forces were at play.
LifeSiteNews reported last week that Leah Gazan, backbencher MP from the New Democratic Party, brought forth a new bill that seeks to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system once operating in Canada was a “genocide.”
Media and Trudeau feds worked together to create unproven claims, says judge
Giesbrecht observed that the mainstream media, meanwhile, did not “question any of these always improbable claims,” and “quite the contrary, they not only played along with these baseless claims, but actively encouraged them.”
“It did not seem to occur to them that they were actively supporting a conspiracy theory,” he noted.
The retired judge noted that “Trudeau and his ministers,” notably Marc Miller, “made matters immeasurably worse by immediately ordering all federal flags to be flown at half mast and promising enormous amounts of money to any other indigenous community that wanted to make a similar claim.”
“The truth is that the TRC’s missing children wild goose chase had thoroughly captivated journalists and entire indigenous communities to the extent that the baseless Tk’emlups claim seemed to make sense to them. Justin Trudeau and his ministers were in that gaggle of gullibles. Canada became the laughing stock of the world for dumbly accepting these wild claims,” he wrote.
Giesbrecht observed how since the unfounded claims exploded on the Canadian media and political scene, both the “Trudeau government” and the state-funded “CBC have doubled down on their refusal to correct the misinformation that they have promoted.”
He warned that the next “logical step” for the Trudeau Liberals and mainstream media “is to stop Canadians from even knowing about” the truth of residential schools, as well as for those who have been muzzled or speaking out.
LifeSiteNews reported in August that Trudeau’s cabinet said it will expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward documenting claims that hundreds of young children died and were clandestinely buried at now-closed residential schools, some of them run by the Catholic Church.
Canadian indigenous residential schools, run by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were set up by the federal government and were open from the late 19th century until 1996.
While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.
Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Jamil Jivani has urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down, saying the recent rash of destruction is a “very serious issue” that is a direct “attack” on families as well as “religious freedom in Canada.”
From Resource Works
By Geoff Russ
For major projects, what is old is new again
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s second wave of “nation-building projects” sounds transformative: six new energy and mining proposals, plus a northern corridor, added to the first tranche unveiled in September, and included in the freshly passed federal budget for the fiscal year.
Together, Ottawa says, they amount to more than $116 billion in investment and are central to “realizing Canada’s full potential as an energy superpower.” That is the pitch in the federal news release.
Look closely, though, and a different picture emerges. For major projects, what is old is new again. Almost every file now being “fast-tracked” was already on the books, sometimes for a decade or more.
The new referrals to the Major Projects Office (MPO) are all familiar: the Nisga’a-led Ksi Lisims LNG terminal on B.C.’s north coast; BC Hydro’s North Coast Transmission Line; Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins; Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Matawinie mine north of Montréal; Northcliff’s Sisson tungsten project in New Brunswick; and the Inuit-owned Iqaluit Nukkiksautiit hydro project in Nunavut. The “Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor” in B.C. and the Yukon is added as a long-range concept.
Long timelines and longstanding obstacles
None of these is a fresh idea. As the Globe and Mail notes in a project-by-project rundown, Ksi Lisims has been in development for years and already faces two Federal Court challenges from nearby First Nations and opposition from Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders who fought Coastal GasLink. The North Coast Transmission Line was identified in 2023, with B.C. legislation to fast-track it and term-sheet co-ownership deals with First Nations already in place. The Sisson mine has been stalled at the pre-construction stage for more than a decade, despite earlier approvals and new public money to update its feasibility study.
Iqaluit hydro is hardly a novelty either. As Globe reporting shows, dam concepts near the city have been studied since the mid-2000s, with the current Inuit-owned proposal building on that earlier work and backed by federal engineering funds. The Crawford nickel project was acquired in 2019 and has spent years lining up investors and a complex financing stack, documented in both CBC and Financial Post coverage. Matawinie received its Quebec authorization in 2021, has an impact-benefit agreement with the local Atikamekw Nation and now enjoys federal price-floor guarantees on graphite.
The first tranche, announced in September, follows the same pattern. LNG Canada Phase 2 in Kitimat, new nuclear at Darlington, Contrecoeur container capacity at the Port of Montréal, McIlvenna Bay in Saskatchewan and the Red Chris expansion in B.C. were all in various stages of planning long before Carney entered office. The MPO is not inventing a new project pipeline; it is trying to accelerate the one Ottawa already had.
Acceleration is the point — and industry welcomes it
Acceleration is, to be fair, the point. The Calgary-based MPO, led by former Trans Mountain head Dawn Farrell, is designed to run permits in parallel, not one after another, and to coordinate financing through bodies like the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund. Farrell told CBC that work which might have taken “five or six more years” could be cut to roughly two. In a country where large projects regularly die of regulatory exhaustion, that is significant.
Industry likes the signal. Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby says MPO referral “puts us in the fast lane,” even without the more controversial “national interest” label in Bill C-5 that would allow cabinet to set aside parts of the Fisheries Act, Species at Risk Act or Impact Assessment Act. Inuit proponents of the Iqaluit project welcome Carney’s description of their hydro plan as a breakthrough for Arctic sovereignty, replacing millions of litres of diesel.
But a superpower strategy this is not
Still, if this is what becoming an “energy superpower” looks like, it is a modest start.
Notably absent from Carney’s list is any new oil pipeline. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spent months pushing a concept for a bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to the northern B.C. coast, doing provincial groundwork in the hope a private proponent will one day take it over. A BBC report sets out the feud with B.C. Premier David Eby, who dismisses the idea as “fictional” and “political” and insists no company wants it, accusing Smith of jeopardizing B.C.’s LNG ambitions. Smith has called that stance “un-Canadian.”
Western frustration is growing. In the National Post, Whitecap Resources chief executive Grant Fagerheim warns of “fury from Alberta and Saskatchewan” if a pipeline to tidewater is never prioritized and argues producers are tired of a U.S.-dominated system where Canadian barrels sell at a discount while others capture the margins. He favours an energy corridor carrying oil, gas, power and rail, not just more rhetoric about nation-building.
Northern ambitions lag behind rhetoric
Another gap is the North. The Indigenous-led Arctic Gateway partnership, Manitoba and Ottawa are already spending heavily on the Hudson Bay Railway and planning new storage and loading systems to expand the Port of Churchill for grain, potash, critical minerals and Arctic resupply. Carney talks up a “huge host of opportunities” in northern Manitoba, but Churchill sits only on the MPO’s lower-profile “transformative strategies” list, with a full plan now pushed out to 2026.
Meanwhile, the one project that has fundamentally shifted Canada’s oil export position is the long-delayed Trans Mountain expansion. As Resource Works points out, TMX now sends diluted bitumen from Burnaby to Asia, shrinking the old “captive discount” and giving Canada genuine leverage in global markets. But TMX predates Carney’s government by more than a decade and only exists because Ottawa nationalized a struggling private pipeline to get it built.
Evolution, not revolution
Carney’s major-projects push is real, and for the companies involved, the prospect of faster permits and clearer federal backing is very good news. Yet for a government that talks about mobilizing a trillion dollars and remaking Canada as an energy superpower, the current list is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For now, Ottawa is mostly trying to build what was already on the drawing board. The tougher choices on pipelines, ports and interprovincial trade still lie in front of it.
Headline photo credit to THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
From the Fraser Institute
By Jason Childs
From 2015 to 2024, the government sector in Canada—including federal, provincial and municipal—added 950,000 jobs, which accounted for roughly 30 per cent of total employment growth in the country, finds a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“In Canada, employment in the government sector has skyrocketed over the last 10 years,” said Jason Childs, a professor of economics at the University of Regina, senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Examining the Growth of Public-Sector Employment Since 2015.
Over the same 10-year period (2015-2024), government-sector employment grew at an annual average rate of 2.7 per cent compared to only 1.7 per cent for the private sector. The study also examines employment growth by province. Government employment (federal, provincial, municipal) grew at a higher annual rate than the private sector in every province except Manitoba over the 10-year period.
The largest gaps between government-sector employment growth compared to the private sector were in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. The smallest gaps were in Alberta and Prince Edward Island.
“The larger government’s share of employment, the greater the ultimate burden on taxpayers to support government workers—government does not pay for itself,” Childs said.
A related study (Measuring the Cost to Canadians from the Growth in Public Administration, also authored by Childs) finds that, from 2015 to 2024, across all levels of government in Canada, the number of public administrators (many of who
work in government ministries, agencies and other offices that do not directly provide services to the public) grew by more than 328,000—or 3.5 per cent annually (on average).
“If governments want to reduce costs, they should look closely at the size of their public administration,” Childs said.
Examining the Growth of Public Sector Employment Since 2015
Jason Childs
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