Thoughts on BC Politics and More

... Under the Indigenous section of the party’s priorities on its website, OneBC says it wants to “defund the reconciliation industry." It also wants street names to be in English, to end land acknowledgements and to remove Truth and Reconciliation Day, observed annually on Sept. 30, as a provincial holiday.  Now, calls for the OneBC leader and MLA to resign are growing.  An online petition calling on Brodie to resign launched in March. It has since garnered about 1,800 signatures.  In early November, the First Nations Leadership Council called for Brodie’s immediate resignation.  Last week, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc kúkpi7 (chief) Rosanne Casimir joined the calls for Brodie to resign ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

Representatives of the Métis Nation British Columbia visiting the legislature Monday got up and left the public gallery in disgust as OneBC Leader Dallas Brodie asked a question rooted in residential school denial. Brodie’s question “felt incredibly disrespectful,” said Patrick Harriott, the organization’s acting vice-president. “We have people, we have relatives that went to residential schools that witnessed these things, and so it’s denying all of those statements from all of those people and all that inter-generational trauma that’s still being carried" ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

Several Indigenous leaders including BC Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee took a moment to call for the resignation of One BC Party Leader and Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie. The request stems from comments made by Brodie regarding residential school survivors back in March, which got her expelled from the Conservative Party of BC. During the first day of the BC Cabinet and First Nations Leadership Gathering in Vancouver, Teegee stated it’s disappointing to see a political voice spewing this kind of rhetoric in the legislature ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Last year, on a cool October day in Gatineau, Quebec, Kimberly Murray presented her final report on burial sites and missing children associated with Indian residential schools. It marked the culmination of over two years of work tasked to her as independent special interlocutor by the government of Canada. Days after meeting with survivors, Elders and youth, releasing her report and talking to media, the lawyer met with Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General Arif Virani and Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree over a video call. On that call, Murray told The Tyee, she found the federal government evasive about what would happen next ... CLICK HERE for the full story

... From 1828 to 1997, 140 federal residential schools operated across Canada. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its Calls to Action in 2015, recommendation 79 addressed incorporating reconciliation in heritage work — including developing a national plan and strategy for commemorating school sites. Since then, the federal government has designated a handful of former schools as national historic sites; Shubenacadie was one of the first, in 2020. This fall, a commemorative park will open a short distance from the school, culminating the work of memorialization.  For survivors and their descendants, many of whom have worked for years to have sites officially recognized, the designations are a complex phenomenon: former schools remain profoundly painful places and some communities have fought to have schools demolished. But while the history of residential schools is indelible for many survivors, collective memory is slippery, and among survivor groups, a patient eff...

Sixty years had passed before police in BC took a second look at the stories of sexual abuse shared by a group of runaways from Kuper Island Indian Residential School. The six young Indigenous boys were reported missing from the notorious institution at 11:30 p.m. on January 8, 1939. They’d taken canoes to escape across the water to their family homes near the town of Chemainus on Vancouver Island. The now-defunct British Columbia Provincial Police opened an investigation into the students’ claims, but after two Catholic clergy were transferred out of province and one staff member was dismissed, no charges were laid.  For a very long time, it looked like the story was finished ... CLICK HERE for the full story

If Canadians are serious that every child matters, we should at least know the names of the “missing” Indian Residential Schools children about whom we hear almost daily in mainstream media reports. There are frequent reports of news conferences staged by indigenous band leaders proclaiming new ground penetrating radar (GPR) “discoveries” of unmarked graves at former residential schools. But the reality is that the small number of excavations which have occurred have yielded no human remains, despite stories of clandestine burials told by indigenous knowledge keepers. It’s more than passing strange that excavations have been happening at Winnipeg landfills to find the bodies of indigenous women who were the victims of murder, yet after more than four years of gut-wrenching stories about the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, there has been no excavation at all for the bodies of 200 or more indigenous children alleged to have been secretly buried there ... C...

When RCMP Const. Calvin Swustus got the call to travel to BC’s Lower Mainland for a week of training in 1995, he knew was being asked to join some sort of specialized task force, but that’s about it. “When I arrived, I looked around and realized that all the First Nations police members were there,” Swustus recalled in a recent interview with the IJF. “After the first day we realized that, ‘Oh we're going to be taking on investigating residential school crimes against our people.’” The mission hit close to home for Swustus, a member of the Cowichan Tribes who was then 17 years into his career with Vancouver Island RCMP. As a teenager, he’d lost friends to suicide stemming from the trauma they’d experienced at the Kuper Island Indian Residential School. Now, he was being inducted into the RCMP Native Indian Residential School Task Force, a team assembled with the ambitious goal of investigating every single allegation of sexual assault and violence at 15 residential schools in BC  ....

The defamatory non-stop claim that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, committed genocide against indigenous people, including Indian Residential School children, is the most scurrilous slur hurled against him by his critics. Accordingly, it is necessary to examine this claim using the gold standard for doing so: the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention lists five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” any one of which constitutes genocide ... CLICK HERE for the full commentary 

“Reconciliation” has been the watchword for Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples for the last 10 years. So, how’s that going? ... ... Our current impasse arises from 250 years of decisions that are now almost impossible to change because they have been made part of Canada’s Constitution, either by elected politicians or by appointed judges. “Big new ideas” are thus virtually impossible to implement. But there is still room for incremental innovations in public policy that focus primarily on economic opportunities benefiting Indigenous Canadians, i.e., on pursuing prosperity and the good things that come with that ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

On February 12, 2025, Parks Canada announced the designation of the Kamloops, BC Indian Residential School as a national historic site. Surprisingly, it omitted any reference to the alleged graves containing 215 missing children in an adjoining apple orchard. “The Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest institution in a system designed to carry out what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as cultural genocide,” Parks Canada said in a statement. No reason was given for omitting reference to unmarked burial sites. Now we know why ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The Union of BC Indian Chiefs says a defamation lawsuit filed by Pat Morton, the spouse of Quesnel Mayor Ron Paull, should be dismissed based on the province’s anti-SLAPP legislation. Morton and her son Kevin Christieson filed separate claims in B.C. Supreme Court on May 12 alleging that a letter the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, or UBCIC, wrote to Quesnel city council last year defamed them and brought “severe reputational damage, emotional distress and fear.” The UBCIC, which represents more than 100 First Nations in B.C., accused Morton of promoting and sharing the controversial book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) at the income tax business where she works ... CLICK HERE for the full story

“On Thursday (March 6th), MLA Dallas Brodie challenged the Conservative Party of BC caucus to fire her — including by asking Conservative MLAs to have a vote on removing her — and made the decision to walk out of the Conservative Party of BC caucus room. As a result of her decision to publicly mock and belittle testimony from former residential school students, including by mimicking individuals recounting stories of abuses — including child sex abuse, MLA Brodie is not welcome to return to our Conservative Party of BC Caucus. Horrible things happened to vulnerable children at Residential Schools — including pedophiles preying on children; at Kamloops Indian Residential School, Gerald Mathieu Moran was charged and convicted by Canadian courts with several dozen sex crimes he committed against children while working there. In a recent podcast appearance, Dallas Brodie uses a mocking, child-like voice to belittle testimony from former residential school students, saying things like “my g...

British Columbia's Opposition attorney general critic is questioning the “apparent mistreatment” of a lawyer after he asked for the rewording of Law Society training material about residential schools. Dallas Brodie of the BC Conservatives says on social media that she'll reach out to B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma and the Law Society of British Columbia in the coming days about the situation facing lawyer James Heller. Brodie's posts on Saturday shared a link to an article about Heller, who unsuccessfully pushed last year for the society's training material to say there were "potentially" burial sites at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., instead of using more definitive language ... CLICK HERE for the full story

A second play in Victoria has been cancelled after complaints that it puts too much focus on the voices of oppressors. Sisters , written by playwright Wendy Lill and staged by Theatre Inconnu, explores residential-school abuse and was supposed to run until March 9. But it was abruptly cancelled Wednesday by the Fernwood Community Association, which operates the building that houses the theatre, with five scheduled performances left . . . . CLICK HERE for the full story

The leader of the Conservative Party of BC is defending a social media post about parental rights denounced as insensitive, hurtful and political on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. As Indigenous leaders were expressing optimism that the province is at a turning point in addressing the dark and complex history of residential schools, John Rustad had posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter, that “we remember what happens when the Canadian government thinks it's better at raising children than parents" ... CLICK HERE for the full story SEE ALSO:  BC Conservative leader under fire for likening teaching of sexuality, gender to residential schools

... Canadians were led to believe, actual human remains would be lifted from the earth—child martyrs whose suffering symbolized the barbarous cruelty of the Canadian colonial state. Slogans were minted. T-shirts were sold. Hundreds of millions of dollars in new grants were sent to Indigenous communities. Trudeau himself, always in his element when things get overwrought, went down on one knee and placed a teddy bear on the site of a former residential school. As noted above, this happened almost two and a half years ago. Yet during that time, not a single actual grave has been discovered, much less anything in the way of human remains. This is not to say that some graves won’t be found. Indeed, it would be surprising if the grounds of some of these old schools, which typically featured churches and graveyards, did not have unpleasant surprises to surrender. But by now it is clear that the hysterical (and that is the right word) media claims of 2021, which suggested vast ...

The ongoing allegation that former residential schools may be sites of multiple secret burials is not consistent with evidence I heard over many weeks covering the Blackwater trial   No doubt, things once unspeakable and for too long unspoken happened to First Nations children at residential schools in Canada.   It is a tragic legacy that requires both silent respect and vehement confirmation. When those details were first revealed publicly at the Blackwater civil trial in Nanaimo in 1998, the lead case in which the federal government and various churches were sued for what they did and did not do at residential schools, to be present as a reporter was on one hand a privilege.    On the other it was a jolt to see the unwholesome things that can and do happen to those who lack privilege ...   CLICK HERE for the full commentary

 ... The original allegation against him from 2021 was he said there was no intent for murder at residential schools. He was told later he might be fired because students were left with the impression some or all of the deaths were from natural causes and that they could not be called murder.    The ASD said he was fired for inflammatory, inappropriate, and insensitive comments to students about graves. Now he is to be barred from teaching for saying deaths at residential schools were comparable to those of the general population.    “The central allegation against me has changed four times,” he said ... CLICK HERE to read the full story

People tearing down statutes and moaning about the names of institutions and streets in the name of combating racism is breathtakingly silly. That is political correctness gone mad. What is truly frightening is that we are witnessing major efforts without accomplishment. Even if those who claim they cannot abide or live with “colonials” who lived in accordance with the social standards of long past days, it does nothing to change the mindset of people today or make any improvements to discriminatory practices. Instead of removing edifices that the perpetually victimized abhor, they should serve as markers to the progress we are making in creating a more inclusive society. The people who are memorialized in statues, on building and in street names are recognized for their accomplishments, nor for their moral standards. An example is Sir John A. Macdonald, our first Prime Minister. Macdonald is falsely accused of initiating the residential school program, but the idea predated Ma...