Look at that, It's almost National Hoax Day again.
It turns out, they've been at this game for decades already. This year will be no different.
wiretapmedia.ca
View: https://x.com/JimMcMurtry01/status/2104561770019082616#m
It turns out, they've been at this game for decades already. This year will be no different.
"The Forgotten RCMP Report That Challenges Canada’s Reconciliation Story"
The Forgotten RCMP Report That Challenges Canada's Reconciliation Story | Wiretap Media
The 2003 RCMP report found B.C. secret-burial claims unsubstantiated and most recorded deaths from disease. At Kamloops it logged 79 complainants—not 215 hidden graves.
wiretapmedia.ca
Got Bones?The 2003 RCMP report found B.C. secret-burial claims unsubstantiated and most recorded deaths from disease. At Kamloops it logged 79 complainants—not 215 hidden graves.
As Canada prepares to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation this Tuesday, the familiar language of survivors, lost children, and the danger of denial will fill the airwaves. But listen closely this year—the mass-grave vocabulary that dominated headlines in 2021 has been replaced by talk of funding, “missing children,” and the face of a new enemy called extremism.
This transformation wasn’t accidental. It represents what happens when a political campaign built on forensic discoveries finds those discoveries lacking, yet the budgetary momentum must continue.
The First Reconciliation Investment
The modern funding trail doesn’t begin with ground-penetrating radar but dates back to January 1998, when then-Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart issued the Statement of Reconciliation and unveiled Gathering Strength. Ottawa allocated $350 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, an Indigenous-run organization tasked with addressing community healing from the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in residential schools, including intergenerational effects. The grant explicitly could not be used for individual compensation or lawsuits—those battles were already brewing.
The language of 1998 already mirrored today’s terminology: harm, healing, partnership, legacy, and community-administered funds. What it wasn’t was a declaration that police had discovered secret cemeteries of murdered children—while the official focus then was abuse within institutions and broader cultural loss, the mass grave conspiracy was explored—in fact, one rumour was so compelling they actually put shovels in the ground.
The Investigation Ottawa Prefers to Ignore
Between 1995 and 2003, the RCMP “E” Division conducted Project E-NIRS—the only province-wide criminal investigation of its kind into allegations at British Columbia’s 15 residential schools. Corporal M.W. Pacholuk authored the final report, which examined every allegation of physical and sexual abuse, along with unlawful and suspicious deaths.
The report wasn’t initially public, only surfacing decades later through an access-to-information request (A-2021-10504) and posted by the Investigative Journalism Foundation. While the document confirms investigators interviewed hundreds of former students and recorded hundreds of alleged offences, with some convictions resulting, the section later notes that politics needed to forget concerns about death and burial allegations.
Regarding unlawful and suspicious deaths, Pacholuk noted that complaints spanned from murder to negligence and “even included allegations that babies were killed and buried on the school grounds.” However, the Task Force and relevant Sub-Division Major Crime Units thoroughly investigated each of these allegations, and not one has ever been substantiated or proven. In many cases, investigations established that deaths resulted from disease or other natural causes; in some instances, the alleged victim was found to be alive years after their supposed death.
The “unmarked graves” in this file aren’t 215 radar anomalies in a Kamloops orchard, but rather rumours of stillborn or killed infants buried on school property or in basements, plus one claim of a ritual killing in the woods. “No evidence was found to substantiate either of these allegations.”
The deaths the task force could document resemble a province grappling with epidemics. Investigators found records of “literally dozens of deaths” across B.C. schools, “the majority” in the 1930s and 1940s, “directly attributable to the different epidemics then sweeping the country”—tuberculosis, meningitis, measles, rheumatic fever, smallpox. Overcrowding and poor conditions exacerbated these outbreaks. Other deaths were accidents, drownings, runaways, and suicides, many with documented coroners’ reports, hospital records, and inquests: There are documents of boys frozen after leaving Lejac in 1937; a girl dead of berry poisoning in Kamloops hospital in 1945; three Kamloops runaways killed when a freight train derailed in 1947.
Kamloops itself appears in the file as a large school that generated 79 complainants over eight years—a number Pacholuk called relatively small for the enrollment. These complaints involved assault and staff concealment of assault, not a hidden field of murdered children.
The Empty Hole
The task force didn’t just investigate rumours—they physically tested them. On February 24, 1999, with band permission, they went to Kuper Island, where stories of dead babies buried there had circulated for years. Investigators “dug up a small portion of the island which had been identified as one of the burial grounds.” They went down about four feet and hit undisturbed soil. “No evidence that would support any of these allegations was found.” They noted that wet ground conditions could have destroyed infant remains—a caveat that matters, as does the result.
This dig occurred during the first national funding wave, not the second. First Nations and the Assembly of First Nations were already pressing Ottawa for recognition, healing money, and compensation. Lawsuits were mounting, and the $350 million was flowing. While this doesn’t prove the 1999 excavation was connected to funding, it does establish that burial rumours and reconciliation money coexisted in the same decade—and when police tested one rumour with a shovel, the ground didn’t yield the expected results.
Later stories promoted by Kevin Annett—the girl pushed down stairs at Alberni, the boy beaten to death for a prune at Ahousat—were checked against hospital and family accounts and didn’t hold as homicides. Pacholuk noted these stories continued circulating in media anyway, demonstrating how folk narratives outlast coroners’ reports.
The Second Reconciliation Investment
On May 27, 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced that ground-penetrating radar had confirmed the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops school. The statement travelled globally as a completed discovery, though it wasn’t. GPR identifies soil disturbances, not skeletons. The technician later walked back the language toward “probable burials” and “targets of interest.” And five years later, no public excavation has produced the 215 remains indigenous groups claim are hidden at these sacred sites.
Ottawa and the provinces responded as if the forensic question were settled. Flags flew at half-mast, a national holiday was created, and search funding followed. The federal Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund, created in August 2021, paid communities to conduct their own searches, while B.C. appointed liaisons. Progress reports on the Kamloops-funded work have been withheld as third-party confidential. The RCMP opened a file but positioned the First Nation as the lead investigator. This represents a new constitutional reality: those announcing the graves now control whether anyone digs, effectively placing First Nations in charge of investigating their own ghost stories.
And it marks a significant departure from 1999, when a police task force could excavate a rumoured burial site with band permission and document undisturbed soil, but now searches are framed as community-led, culturally governed, and, when convenient, too sacred to complete publicly. An unverified announcement becomes a funding stream and an unfinished excavation becomes proof of sensitivity rather than a missing result.
The institutional failure on this is disastrous—and sometimes you wonder if it wasn’t all done on purpose.
The Shifting Narrative
The evolution of the vocabulary tells the story of how Canada’s reconciliation discourse transformed over three decades. In 1998, the language centred on abuse, healing, partnership, and a $350 million funding commitment. But by 2003, the police file told a different story: murder-and-secret-burial allegations had not been substantiated, disease deaths were documented, and one physical dig had come up empty. The narrative shifted dramatically in 2021 when headlines announced that remains had been found and mass graves entered public consciousness, with genocide becoming part of everyday language. But now in 2026, reality has moved to “missing children” funds, denialism, hate laws, and urgent pleas to prevent programs from expiring.
This transformation became particularly evident on September 24, when NDP MP Leah Gazan stood on Parliament Hill with survivors and urged the government not to cut the Missing Children Community Support Fund. She spoke of healing, intergenerational trauma, the 2022 House recognition of genocide, and a bill to treat residential-school “denialism” as incitement to hate.
Gazan’s presentation functions not as a forensic briefing but as a salvage operation, where the grave is no longer exhibit A in the investigation and the critic has become the extremist instead. This inversion only makes sense if a story has been elevated from lead evidence to a sacred reservation belief. The E-NIRS investigators approached it differently, treating stories of bodies in the ground as a reason to investigate. Their investigation revealed that some alleged victims were actually alive, some notorious homicides were hospital deaths, and the island excavation uncovered only soil. Under Gazan’s rule—that denying stories constitutes violence—the original investigation itself would be classified as an assault. Police work cannot operate under such constraints, and neither can the pursuit of historical truth.
What the Public Deserves
This week’s anniversary will produce orange shirts and institutional statements, but beneath the ceremonial displays lies a document that demands attention. Children died in residential schools—many from disease, some from accidents and neglect, and some from abuse, as confirmed by the B.C. police file. Yet the secret mass-grave campaign of 2021 political line has moved from “we found the bodies” to “it is extremist to say we did not,” while the people who control the sites also control the pace of proof.
Reconciliation that cannot survive its own 2003 report is not reconciliation. It is a brand extension of 1998, with a 2021 hood ornament. The Healing Foundation was honest about what it was purchasing: repair after abuse. The missing-children fund is buying something else—the right to keep an office rumour alive without producing evidence.
The report is public, the quotes are on paper, and the hole on Kuper Island was dug. But the orchard at Kamloops remains unproven—and until it does, the country can mourn the dead it can name, and refuse to let “denialism” become the word for asking why a story that led police to almost nothing is now the story you are not allowed to doubt.
View: https://x.com/JimMcMurtry01/status/2104561770019082616#m
Upvote
11
