From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

Millions spent, no exhumations. What are we actually mourning?

From Aug. 15 to 17, 2025, the Canadian flag flew at half-mast above the British Columbia legislature. The stated reason: to honour the shíshálh Nation and mourn the alleged discovery of 81 unmarked graves of Indigenous children near the former St. Augustine’s Residential School in Sechelt.

But unlike genuine mourning, this display of grief lacked a body, a name or a single verifiable piece of evidence. As MLA Tara Armstrong rightly observed in her open letter to the Speaker, this symbolic act was “shameful”—a gesture unmoored from fact, driven by rumour, emotion and political inertia.

The flag was lowered in response to claims from University of Saskatchewan archaeologist Dr. Terry Clark. According to announcements from both 2023 and 2025, Dr. Clark “discovered” 81 unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar—a tool that detects changes in soil, not bones. Its signals require interpretation—and in this case, the necessary context never arrived.

Even more concerning, there has been no release of names or records. Chief Lenora Joe of the shíshálh Nation said the names of the children are “well known” to Elders. Yet none have been made public: not a single missing child reported, no date of disappearance, no death certificate, not even a family willing to speak openly.

Instead, we’re being asked to accept deeply held recollections as conclusive proof—without corroborating evidence.

The original 40 anomalies—first announced in April 2023—appear to be located beneath the paved parking lot of the band’s administrative and cultural hub, the House of Hewhiwus complex. This land has been excavated before. At no point were any human remains discovered. As former Chief Warren Paull confirmed, “remains were never found” and the stories circulating then “don’t include burial at all.” The pattern of red dots in the band’s video—a tidy grid beneath the asphalt—looked less like sacred ground and more like a plumbing schematic.

The grief narrative, meanwhile, was presented with great care. Professionally produced videos showed solemn Elders, blurred radar images and mournful speeches—all designed to evoke emotion while discouraging inquiry. In one video, Chief Joe warned that asking questions would “cause trauma.”

But reconciliation doesn’t mean blind acceptance. Silencing questions isn’t healing—it risks turning reconciliation into a one-way narrative.

In a 2025 follow-up, Dr. Clark reported another 41 anomalies—this time likely in the community’s own cemetery on Sinku Drive. Brief footage confirms that GPR was conducted among existing gravesites, where decayed wooden markers would naturally result in “unmarked” burials. As Tara Armstrong noted, finding undocumented graves in or near a cemetery is about as surprising as spotting seagulls at a landfill.

Even so, political leaders continued to validate the narrative.

The B.C. government endorsed the claims with another round of symbolic mourning. In doing so, it lent the power of the state to what increasingly resembles collective fiction. Since 2021, similar claims across Canada have triggered government apologies, funding announcements and media headlines—often without physical evidence.

Residential schools were bureaucratic institutions. They kept meticulous enrolment and death logs. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with eight years of access to these archives, conducted more than 6,500 interviews and reviewed thousands of documents. It found no cases of children who disappeared without a trace. Despite this, $2.6 million in federal funds was spent in 2025 alone on the Sechelt investigation.

This isn’t reconciliation: it’s mythmaking dressed up as healing. Worse still, it undermines real tragedies by replacing verifiable history with folklore dressed up in government robes.

Governments should not promote unverified stories with ceremonial gestures. Flags lowered at half-mast should honour actual deaths, not narrative convenience. Public policy, especially around historical reckoning, must be rooted in fact, not feelings.

If reconciliation is to mean anything, it must be anchored in shared truth. And the truth is, we cannot mourn 81 phantom children because they almost certainly never existed.

Canadians must start insisting on evidence. The standard of proof should be no different here than in any serious allegation. The principle that underpins our justice system—innocent until proven guilty—must also guide our view of history.

State-sponsored guilt rituals disconnected from verifiable fact are not justice.

They are theatre.

And not even good theatre.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023). With files from Nina Green.