(LifeSiteNews) –– The Canadian federal government will be halting funding to a committee tasked with searching for “unmarked burials” near former residential schools after zero graves were discovered and millions of taxpayer dollars spent.
In a statement released last week, the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials said it was “extremely disappointed to learn that the Government of Canada has decided to discontinue funding to support their work to help Indigenous communities in their efforts to identify, locate and commemorate missing children.”
NAC urged “the federal government to reconsider” its funding cuts to the committee, which is co-administered by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the federal Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, that was struck in 2021.
The reality of the situation is that since the NAC was struck not one body has been located on lands associated with former government-funded and mandated residential schools, many of which were run by Catholic and Anglican churches in Canada.
In fact, Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations had already confirmed it spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a now-closed residential school, but that the search has turned up no human remains.
The initial funds budgeted in 2022 to aid in “locating burial sites linked to former Residential Schools” were already set to expire in 2025, with some $216.5 million having been spent.
A total of $7.9 million granted for fieldwork has resulted in no human remains having been found to date.
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 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 cut in funding comes after Trudeau’s cabinet said last year it would expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward the project.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021 when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar.
The First Nation now has changed its claim of 215 graves to 200 “potential burials.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau as recently as June again falsely stated that “unmarked graves” were discovered at former residential schools.
Canadian indigenous residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 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.
While some children did die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children tragically passed away because of unsanitary conditions due to the federal government, not the Catholic Church, failing to properly fund the system.
In October of 2024, 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.