Barbara Kay: Globe digs itself even deeper with mea culpa about Kamloops coverage

A chemistry class at Kamloops residential school is seen in a circa 1959 archival photograph. Photo by Archives

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On May 30, the Globe and Mail editorial board issued a mea culpa, titled “There is no reconciliation without truth,” attesting to the newspaper’s failure to meet professional standards on an important national story. Ironically, for a piece centred on journalistic shortcomings, this defensive editorial not only itself contains significant journalistic shortcomings, but fails to deliver the only conclusion that merits genuine approval.

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In the first paragraph, they admit that they wrongly accepted as true the 2021 allegation of “unmarked graves” near the former Kamloops, B.C., residential school without a shred of evidence to back up the claim. Fine. But in the very next paragraph, they state: “3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

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Not true, according to Nina Green, an independent researcher whose website Indian Residential School Records is a documentary treasure trove on this issue. For many years, it has been Green’s regular habit to send mass emails to politicians and journalists across Canada, including the Globe, correcting the errors she finds in their reportage. With attached receipts, of course. (The Globe has never responded to them, Green tells me.)

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In her latest missive, which unpacks the Globe editorial, she writes that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) claimed no such thing. The TRC states that 423 named children died “on the premises” of a residential school, or 832 when the named and unnamed registers are combined. Which amounts to 832 children “out of the 150,000 children alleged to have attended the 139 schools over a period of 133 years” —  a little over six deaths a year in the entire residential school system.

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For another error, the Globe editorial states that an unnamed “government official” in the early 1900s considered deaths at residential schools to be the result of negligence so pervasive it “came unpleasantly close to manslaughter.” But the source was not a government official. Toronto judge and reformer Samuel Hume Blake wrote a pamphlet in the form of a letter to the Minister of the Interior in January 1907. His subject was not the residential schools, but the “lack of sanitation in Indian homes on reserves” that led inevitably to tuberculosis.

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Blake wrote: “(D)oing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.” (My emphasis.) Amongst other recommendations, Blake called for the establishment of clinical centres with trained nurses to give instruction to Indian women and children “in the ordinary hygienic rules — the non-observance of which cultivates tuberculosis and scrofulous affections — principal causes in the high death rate.” The Globe’s error turned beneficence into wickedness.