(LifeSiteNews) –– Conrad Black, founder of the once right-leaning Canadian newspaper the National Post, has called the “entire” indigenous residential schools “mass graves” controversy a “fraud.”
“This entire controversy is an outrage, a boondoggle and a fraud. False accusations of genocide do not promote ‘reconciliation.’ Justin Trudeau’s performance has been shameful; he has disgraced Canada,” wrote Black in an August 26 opinion piece published in the National Post.
Black, who is known for not holding back his views, wrote in his opinion piece titled, “The often-ignored truth,” that it is with “Reluctance, I revisit Aboriginal issues.” He noted he did so to “assault directly the federal government’s compulsive pious posturing about what is commonly and misleadingly called ‘reconciliation.’”
“Practically everyone agrees that Canada’s First Nations have many legitimate grievances and wishes justice for them. To accomplish this, we must not only produce a radically new policy; we must also undo the injustices we have inflicted on ourselves,” wrote Black.
He noted that the controversy surrounding the “unmarked graves of missing children” has now gone quiet, “presumably because its propagators declined to use the money that has been allocated to establish whether there are any such graves.”
“This controversy blew up so quickly into shocking charges bandied about and repeated all over the world that a pause enables us to review them briefly with no hyperbole,” he observed.
Black’s comments come in light of a recent report about how an excavation conducted at the indigenous Pine Creek Residential School, located in Pine Creek, Manitoba, turned up no human remains.
The four-week-long excavation was led by the First Nation’s tribe Minegoziibe Ashinabe, and came after a total of 14 abnormalities were found at the former school by ground-penetrating radar.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the government-mandated residential schools. These reports came from disturbances found at school sites by ground-penetrating radar (GPR), not through actual excavation or discovery of remains.
Since the start of the controversy in 2021, well over 100 churches, most of them Catholic, have either been burned or vandalized across Canada.
Despite the lack of physical evidence, last year Canada’s House of Commons, under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, formalized the controversy and declared the residential school program a “genocide.”
As for Black, he blasted the federal government for spending some $4.7 billion in reparations as a way of “addressing the shameful legacy of residential schools,” noting that while “the schools undoubtedly inflicted many episodes of mistreatment” their intended “purpose was to lift Indigenous children out of poverty and illiteracy and launch them promisingly into adulthood.”
Black: Trudeau ‘seized’ the ‘mass graves’ controversy for political gain
Canada’s Residential School system was a structure of boarding schools funded by the Canadian government that ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.
Some schools were run by Catholic religious orders that had settled in Canada. While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the past wrongs have led to intense anti-Catholic sentiment, which exploded last summer after the discovery of so-called “unmarked” graves in Kamloops, British Columbia.
In his op-ed, Black took a shot at Trudeau, saying that he had “seized the headship of this burgeoning movement of national self-flagellation by ordering all federal government Canadian flags to be lowered to half-mast until further notice, in recognition of the ‘215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school.'”
“Thus, on no authority whatsoever, he used the presence of possible but unverified burials of unidentified people to portray Canada as having once been a charnel house of murdered and secretly interred Indigenous children,” charged Black, noting that Trudeau did this despite there being “no evidence to sustain any part of that allegation.”
Hammering his point, Black pointed out that “No groups of unmarked graves have been discovered anywhere in Canada” and that all the allegations have been made based on soil disturbances.
“… despite the generous provision of public funds to conduct the necessary forensic investigation, it is not known if any of them are human burials, much less children’s graves,” wrote Black.
“It is almost completely unpublicized that much of the GPR research was conducted in community cemeteries not restricted to Indigenous people located near residential school sites, and that graves were often marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long survive the Canadian climate. There may be thousands of now unmarked graves of Indigenous people of all ages,” observed Black.
Besides Black, the retired Bishop of Calgary, Frederick Henry, recently came out against the official residential school narrative as well.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Henry blasted the blatant “lie” that thousands of missing indigenous children who attended residential schools run by the Catholic Church were somehow “clandestinely” murdered by “Catholic priests and nuns” and placed in unmarked graves.
He slammed both the federal government and his brother bishops for going along with, or promoting, the unsubstantiated claim that thousands of indigenous children either went missing, or were killed and buried, at the hands of Catholics operating the now-defunct residential school program once mandated by the Canadian government.
While it is true that some students were traumatized by their experience at the schools, this was not a universal experience and is not unique to residential schools, as some students do not adjust well to boarding schools in general.