(LifeSiteNews) — An adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet said that even though there is skepticism toward unfounded claims of “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children at residential schools, deliberate deceptions of the graves should be considered “hate” speech.
The comments were made by independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Kimberly Murray at a recent Senate Indigenous Peoples committee meeting. She said it is “one thing to say you don’t believe there are burials,” and it is “your opinion and you can have freedom of speech to say that.”
However, Murray then said that when a person says “there are no burials, that First Nations people or the Indians are lying because they want you to go burn down churches or they want to take away your cottages,” this is “inciting hate against Indigenous people.”
“That’s the type of speech we need to stop,” she added.
The reality is that Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations confirmed it spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a now-closed residential school, but the search has turned up no human remains.
As reported by LifeSiteNews in August, Trudeau’s cabinet will expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward documenting thus far unfounded claims that hundreds of young children died and were clandestinely buried at now-closed residential schools, some of them run by the Catholic Church.
Murray, who said she thinks there are mass graves at residential schools, claimed that those fully denying graves exist are somehow inciting “hate speech” that she said is “not protected by the Charter and it is getting worse in the country.”
“We need to ensure survivors and communities are safe. We need to send a clear message to Canadians that it is not OK to incite this kind of hate,” she said.
“When the children died, government and church officials did not return the children home for burial … They were buried in cemeteries at the institutions, often in unmarked and mass graves which were sometimes dug by the other children.”
In October, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children.
“The indigenous leadership has exploited an obviously false claim – pocketing a mountain of tax dollars, while our moribund mainstream media sits in silence,” the judge said.
Giesbrecht was vocal about criticizing the claims made by the legacy media and the Trudeau government that the Catholic Church is complicit in the deaths of thousands of Indigenous Canadians who attended government-mandated residential schools.
As a result of the claims, since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.
The church burnings started in 2021 after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools.
Giesbrecht observed that the reality is that historical records “clearly show” that “the children who died of disease or accident while attending residential school were all given Christian burials, with their deaths properly recorded.”
Despite the attacks on Canadian churches, Leah Gazan, a backbencher MP from the New Democratic Party, brought forth a bill earlier this year that seeks to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system once operating in Canada was a “genocide.”
Canadian indigenous residential schools, run by the Catholic Church and other Christian groups, were set up by the federal government and were open from the late 19th century until 1996.
While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.
Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Jamil Jivani urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down, saying the recent rash of destruction is a “very serious issue” that is a direct “attack” on families as well as “religious freedom in Canada.”