In recent months, both Minister of Immigration Marc Miller and Attorney General David Lametti have stated they would take seriously the proposal to add residential-school denialism to the criminal code. This proposal gained momentum in the wake of an international furor around the 2021 discovery of a purported mass grave of indigenous children, detected by ground-penetrating radar, at a school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Well before that, the residential-school system had figured centrally in Canadian politics, with politicians promising action to achieve “reconciliation” with the indigenous population in every recent election. Despite millions spent on commissions, land-claim settlements, and countless other initiatives, the desired reconciliation seems more elusive than ever.

At the time, most Canadians, myself included, assumed that the children whose bodies had supposedly been detected at Kamloops had been summarily buried to conceal brutal maltreatment at the hands of the racist staff of the school. But as time went by, some critically minded people pointed out glaring inconsistencies in the mass-grave story. To date, no human remains have been unearthed from the site, and there is doubt that it is even a graveyard at all.