Terry Glavin: The left’s idea of residential school ‘denialism’ is a conspiracy theory

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Unsatisfied with skeptics being merely “cancelled,” Murray recommended that residential schools denialism be criminalized by adding it specifically to the Holocaust denial provisions in the Criminal Code, by way of the Online Harms Act, Bill C-63.

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Among Bill C-63’s critics was David Thomas, former chair of the federal Human Rights Tribunal, who said the proposed law would be so onerous that even though it would have been unlikely to withstand Charter challenges, hardly anyone would risk incurring its wrath. Even news media organizations would likely avoid the risk, Thomas said. In this way, prosecutors would “win their wars without firing a bullet.”

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Bill C-63 has been abandoned, at least temporarily. It was dropped when Trudeau resigned and prorogued Parliament in January 2025. But NDP MP Leah Gazan already had her own ideas about how to prosecute “residential schools denialism.” Gazan’s 2024 bill hasn’t made it past first reading, but Monday night’s Senate committee proposal replicates its contents, except for one key difference.

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Gazan’s Bill C-413 contained provisions that nobody could be convicted of residential schools denialism if the offending statements were true and made in good faith. You can understand that as evidence of a sensible failsafe, or as evidence of yet another onerous law you’d be foolish to risk violating, another case of prosecutors being given an opportunity to “win their wars without firing a bullet.”

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The Senate committee members on Monday voted 7-1 to amend Bill C-9, yet another hate crimes law that has been widely opposed by civil libertarians, church groups and labour organizations, with the following: “Everyone who by communicating statements other than in private conversation wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying or downplaying the Indian Residential School system is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”

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Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell had this to say about what denialism means. “It can involve denying, minimizing or justifying the documented abuses, deaths, forced assimilation and intergenerational harms experienced by Indigenous people through the Residential School system.”

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Perhaps it can. But it is simply impossible to avoid breaking the proposed law by “downplaying” or “minimizing” the harms of residential schools if you merely insist that it’s borderline insanity to equate Canada’s residential schools legacy with the Holocaust. Several of the advocates of the C-9 amendment have explicitly drawn that comparison, including Tk’emlups chief Rosanne Casimir, who explained the time it’s taking to provide evidence of the burials allegedly discovered in 2015 this way: “Holocaust investigations have continued for more than 75 years.” The Senate’s proposed amendment would shunt “residential schools denialism” in the same section of the Criminal Code that deals with Holocaust denial.

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Long before the Senate committee began its hearings, Bill C-9 was already the subject of intense controversy, hotly opposed by Canada’s Black churches, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Anglicans, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Labour Congress. More than 40 civil society organizations have raised alarms about Bill C-9.

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The faith organizations oppose it because it was amended in the House last December to remove the religious-expression exemption that the Criminal Code has provided for decades. The CLC opposes it because of fears that it impinges upon workers’ rights to strike and protest. The CCLA is against it because it could be used to criminalize protest, and because the Liberals seem to want to just rush it through without proper assessment: “This should alarm every Canadian who cares about democratic practice and free expression.”

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Much of the phenomenon that has come to be called “residential schools denialism” consists merely of objections to the recirculation of lurid anti-Catholic tropes about nuns killing infants in convents and burning babies in ovens that go back to the 19th century in the United States. By equating residential schools with the death camps of the Shoah, advocates of criminalizing residential schools denialism trivialize the Holocaust, a classic sign of antisemitism.