Many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops Residential School and others like it date to the early decades of the Cold War. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides—that is, the staff who worked at these schools—could still be alive. Perhaps their crimes might even be studied and solved by inspecting the bones of children buried alongside one another. Surely, no effort would be spared to pull evidence from the ground immediately, so that criminal cases could be prosecuted before the passage of time allowed the killers to escape accountability for their racist bloodbath.

But then the weeks and months passed in 2021. Spring turned to summer, then summer to fall, and fall to winter, and … nothing happened. It’s now been 14 months since the original announcement was made about presumed graves in Kamloops, and no physical evidence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains. In fact, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t even seem to be any systematic effort by police or First Nations leaders to commence such investigations. Eventually, it began to strike the general public that this was a very odd way to treat a mass murder scene, even as pundits and politicians refused to change their early, apocalyptic tone.

Which brings us back to that CBC announcement in December, which informed us that “the discovery of unmarked graves” had been Canada’s biggest news story of 2021. That very statement encoded the polite lie, which most Canadian journalists have been encouraged to repeat in one form or another, that some known number of “unmarked graves” had well and truly been “discovered.” The truth was (and remains) that the number of confirmed graves remains at zero. No one, to my knowledge, has found any human remains—i.e., body parts or tissue from decaying corpses—either at Kamloops or any of the other former Residential Schools, through the use of GPR.

So yes, the story did arguably qualify as “Canada’s news story of the year”—but not insofar as it was a story about graves. Rather, it turned out to be a story about the herd behaviour of Canada’s intellectual class. Thousands of politicians, writers, broadcasters, and activists spent months crowd-sourcing the creation of a completely unsupported national narrative, and then failed to correct the record once their rush to judgment had run headlong into reality.

I’ve been in journalism for a quarter century, and have witnessed plenty of bizarre controversies within my trade. But I’ve never witnessed anything similar to this phenomenon. It’s like one of those case-studies in mass hysteria and popular delusion that you read about in history books.