(0:00 - 0:44) Canada has, for the last several years, been gripped by an overwhelming national guilt over supposed genocide at Indian residential schools, with the claims of mass graves of murdered children being widely promoted by mainstream media and the government and unquestionably accepted by many Canadians. But what if the entire narrative is false? Brian Giesbrecht, a retired Manitoba court judge, has investigated these claims in depth, from the real history of residential schools to who would benefit from this false narrative, and he has written extensively on the subject. Brian joins me today to reveal the facts. (0:45 - 7:55) The facts about what conditions at the schools were really like, from statements made by Indigenous people who attended them, the fact that not a single grave has actually been found, despite many attempts to do so, and the facts about where the $40 billion that Trudeau's government has committed to truth and reconciliation is really going. Brian, welcome to the show. I've invited you to this interview because of articles that you wrote and were posted at True North that reveal that you obviously know a great deal about the residential schools, the history of them, the whole narrative, and why we've been subjected to this idea of mass graves. And so I'm wanting you today to shed a lot of light on this, and I'd like to start by asking you to talk about the actual history of the schools, because people don't know. And once you do know the history, I think that goes a long ways towards already calling into question this narrative. Well, residential schools were schools, and that's why they were set up. The notion, the idea that Indians, particularly the Plains Indians, had to have access to schools and education is as old as Canada, and it was one of John A. MacDonald's particular goals to provide education. And when the treaties were signed across the West and North, beginning in about 1870, the treaties all had a provision in them that said that if an Indian band wanted a school, the government would provide the school, and they ended up providing teachers and other assistance, even though that wasn't in the treaties. Now, that was not a provision that was forced on the Indian chiefs who were signing the treaties, because they wanted exactly the same thing. And for obvious reasons, the children had to be able to speak English, and learn to read and write, and survive in a modern world. We should remember that around that time, things were very, very bad for the Plains Indians. The buffalo were disappearing, and disease was ravaging communities. So having schools was just a very common sense and very natural type of thing. And indeed, day schools were set up across the West on the various Indian reserves. The problem was that they didn't work, and there were all kinds of reasons for that. But the main one is that they weren't part of Indian culture. As a matter of fact, some of the Indian languages actually, the phrase going to school was in their language, to sit. In other words, to have a child sit in a classroom all day. And so it was alien to the culture. But it was also very difficult, even impossible for many of the parents to do, even if they wanted to have their child in a school regularly. For instance, if you're out on the trapline for the winter, what do you do? How do you possibly send your child to school? Anyways, there's a long story there, but the long and short of it was that the schools weren't working very well. The children, even when they were enrolled in these schools, often attended very sporadically. So the idea was that they should have something better. The federal government, for its part, wanted to create an indigenous elite, educated elite. They wanted chiefs to be educated. They wanted more educated professional people. And the churches wanted converts. That's what the churches wanted. And we have to remember that at that time, the division between Catholic and Protestant, that was very competitive. So the churches wanted people for their church. And by that time, most of the parents were already Christian. They were either Catholic. The North was mainly Catholic, and the South more Protestant. In any event, the federal government came up with the idea of establishing residential schools, boarding schools. These were based on the American boarding school model. And the idea was that for parents who wanted their children to be enrolled in a school that would provide a very good education, or at least a better education than what they received in day schools, these schools would be available. Now, they were never designed to be for all indigenous people. At the height of enrollment, only one third of status Indians even attended these schools. But for select people, the parents who are willing to send their children away to a residential school, because some of these schools were actually quite far from the reserves, particularly for Northern parents. In some cases, they were right on the reserves or next to them. But in some cases, it meant sending your child away. So not that many parents chose that option. But at least in those initial years, after the program was started, it was started in 1883. Most of the kids who were attending the residential schools were actually the sons and daughters of the, particularly the sons of the chiefs, and the leading people. And the schools were very well received. If you look at the reports during that time, the parents were quite pleased with the fact that their kids were getting an education. And in fact, most of the leaders, the indigenous leaders from the, at least the earlier years, and later on as well, had gone to residential schools. And the reason is that they did provide a superior level of education. But one of the problems with the schools is that they were increasingly used as child welfare centers. And I won't go into a lot of detail about that. But the federal government never did have a child apprehension procedure, a child welfare agency component like the provinces did. The provinces by that time were children's aid societies, where if a parent was not properly looking after a child, either because they couldn't or they wouldn't, a child, a children's aid society would be able to take the child. The federal government had no such thing. So they chose to use residential schools for children from dysfunctional families. (7:56 - 8:42) And that has caused a great deal of difficulty over the years, because you had some extremely damaged children from dysfunctional homes. And they were placed in residential schools, and mixed in with the other population of children from stable backgrounds. And that has caused a great deal of difficulties. But anyways, that in a nutshell is a little history of residential schools. But the important thing is that only a small fraction of Indian children ever went to residential schools, and parents were not forced to send them. Basically, a Catholic parent would decide that they wanted their child to be educated at a Catholic home. (8:42 - 9:22) A Protestant parent, be it Methodist or Anglican, etc., would decide that they wanted their child to be educated at a Protestant school. They signed an application. In some cases, the applications were refused because the schools were full or whatever. But this notion that every child was attending a residential school is false. And it's equally false that the parents were forced to send their children to school. That was not the case. They were not forced. This was a choice of the parents. Most parents did not choose to send their children to residential schools. (9:22 - 13:11) So that is sort of a nutshell history throughout. Right. Now, there's been a claim made that 150,000 Native children were forced to go to these schools. But that is clearly a false narrative since from what I've read, 150,000 is the approximate number of Native children who went to residential schools. So therefore, it suggests that all 150,000 of them were forced. But you put some real perspective in one of your articles on that term, forced. Please explain what's actually meant by it. Well, I suppose we were all forced to go to school. If we want to say that a child not wanting to go to school is being forced, my parents forced me to go to school. The real question is, were Indigenous parents forced to send their children to residential schools? And as I've explained, the answer is no, they were not forced to send their children to residential schools. They had to apply for their child's entry. Now, where the confusion comes in is, as I explained, the child welfare cases. These are cases where the parent was unable or unwilling to look after the child. And in those cases, the government in the form usually of the Indian age back in the day would decide to take that child out of the home for the child's own safety and then put the child into a residential school. So if you want to say, well, that child was forced to attend a school, that would be no different than today saying any child who was apprehended from their home, either by an Indigenous child welfare agency or any other agency, that they're forced. Well, of course, the agency is going to put that child in a school. And that's what happened. The Indian agents and their equivalents used the residential schools as places to put children from extremely dysfunctional backgrounds. And when I'm saying dysfunctional backgrounds, that almost always refers to drinking in the home. There was a virtual explosion of alcohol use to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And as a result, many of the children were left in very dangerous situations. They had to be removed from the home and residential schools, at least in the earlier years, were used for child welfare purposes. But no, parents chose to send their child to residential schools or they chose to send their child to a day school. They had to make one of those choices. And most chose day schools. So there was a choice there. Now, before 1920, when compulsory school attendance laws came in for status Indians, they didn't have to make any of those choices. An Indian parent could decide that their child could just not go to school. And most children did not go to school or else they were enrolled but attended sporadically. So from 1883 to 1920, there were no school attendance laws whatsoever for status Indians. And only the parents who made a choice to send their child to residential schools by signing an application did so. After 1920, wherever a day school existed, an Indian parent could choose between a residential school or a day school. The only exception was if a day school was not available, in which case a residential school would have to be used. (13:11 - 19:27) So the force to attend is a narrative that the CBC has pushed ever since the TRC started to operate. It's a false narrative that they have been pushing. I don't know why. And this is obviously something that people should know about. Right. Now, you've talked about the compulsory attendance for the Native children coming in 1920. And I'm referring to some notes from one of your articles where you were talking about Manitoba. And it seems to me that when you look at the timing, it's very obvious that the government was simply trying to apply to them the same rules they applied to everyone else. Because in Manitoba in 1916, that was when compulsory attendance for all children came in, excepting the Native children. And it was only four years later when they made that attendance compulsory, obviously, in order to try to make sure that everyone was educated. But it seems very clear that they weren't forcing anyone. Because, as you said in one of your articles, as late as 1944, upwards of 40% of Indian children went to no school at all. Yeah, exactly. The school attendance laws, there's a long history of why it took so long for school attendance laws to come into force in the prairie provinces. Manitoba was 1916. It was 1917 for Saskatchewan and Alberta. The eastern provinces had had school attendance laws for a long time, since the 1870s, 1880s. But we have to remember that the residential schools were created primarily for the Plains Indians. They were the ones that were in trouble. The eastern Indians, people in Ontario and Quebec, the indigenous population had been living with white society for hundreds of years. As a matter of fact, there's so much intermarriage now, it's really very difficult to tell in some places whether a person is indigenous or white, it's really how they identify. But the federal government, of course, brought in compulsory school attendance laws, it would have been negligent for them not to do so. But the original framers of the residential school program, all insisted that the decision about where they sent their children to school should be left to the Indian parents. Nobody wanted them forced to attend. As a matter of fact, John A. Macdonald and Duncan Campbell Scott were probably the most important people in the whole residential school program, insisted throughout their careers that Indian parents must have the choice whether or not they sent their children to a residential school or any school at all. And it was only in 1920 when things had to change because, as you say, the school attendance laws were in effect all over Canada by that time. So there had to be a law. And still, parents were given the choice, do you want to send your child to a residential school or a day school? And as I say, most chose day schools. And you related a story in one of your articles that I think really highlights the fact that it's a false narrative that they were being forced to go because there was an entire community that removed their children and wrote letters to the school saying they weren't going to return them until there was a promise made that they would be properly fed. Obviously, there was a problem in this particular school. So if they were being forced to go, well, then how could an entire community withdraw their children? Yes. And I'll tell you another really good example from where I live, close to where I live, the Brandon Residential School was started by Methodists. And these are the same people who went up north and tried to develop the day school program and found that there were so many problems with it that they decided that with the federal government, they would open up a school far away in Brandon and have the Indian kids come down to the Brandon school. Well, during the first years of operation of that school, you actually had, and I have pictures of this, you had the principal and the teachers paddling around in canoes way up north, trying to convince Indian parents to send their kids to school. And for the first few years, they didn't have any success because after all, sending your child away for the entire school year is a great sacrifice. But then after a few years, when stories started to get to the parents about the good results of going to a school, they started to send their children to school. And as a result, Brandon School became full, they couldn't accept any more students. And throughout that time, though, there were no school attendance laws whatsoever. And yet you had Indian parents who decided to send their children to school. And as I say, most of those parents were what I call the from the achieving groups, particularly the chief and the leaders in the community, they wanted their children to be educated. And part of the reason is they wanted them to assume positions of leadership and their own community. So if you look at the Indian leaders of the past many generations, you'll find that there's a disproportionate number who went to residential schools. You're thinking about James Gladstone or Len Marchand. Len Marchand was the first Indian federal cabinet minister. His son is now the chief justice of BC. But these people went to residential schools, and that is in large part why they achieved their success. Even one of the TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Commissioners, Wilton Littlechild, very distinguished man. I think he was a doctor as well as a lawyer. (19:28 - 22:24) But he actually said, this is before he became a commissioner and became rather political. He said that if it hadn't been for his 14 years of residential school, he would have winded up as a drunk on skid row. And he praised the residential schools to the sky. And that used to be the case. I became a judge in 1976. So I've been around kind of a long time. And the original discussions I used to have with people in the Indian community, it was kind of a mixed bag because half of them, roughly, would be very positive about their experience in a residential school. And half of them would be quite negative. And I have come to the conclusion, and this is not something the TRC Commission discussed at all, I've come to the conclusion that this really has to do with the divide between the families who, the stable families, I'll call them, and the dysfunctional families. The children from dysfunctional backgrounds tend not to do well, whether they're placed in a child welfare home, whether they're left in their bad home, or wherever they're placed. And so you have this great divide between the child welfare component in the residential schools and the children from stable homes, who did overall quite well. And this is something that the TRC, I do not know why, they didn't discuss at all. Now, one more claim that I think we have to address, and you don't talk about it in your articles, but I'm certain you're aware of it. There were claims made that the children, when they were returning to the school in the fall, that they were being forced to shower, scrubbed down, forced to change their clothes. But the reason for that was that, and there were cases where these kids were coming back in September in the same clothes they left in at the beginning of the summer, infested with lice. So of course they had to clean them up and put them in clean clothes. I think this is the reason why many of these residential schools have uniforms. Yes, that's the exact picture. I actually have some anecdotal information about that. It just happens that I used to be, when I was a law student, I worked on the summers on the trains. And we would go up to, one of our trips was going up with Churchill, Manitoba, which is in the far north, and collecting along the path on the way back to Dauphin, where there was a residential school, the kids. And these were, it was a strange experience because the train would stop in the middle of the bush, and a bunch of kids would come yelling and screaming onto the train. And they were wonderful kids. I mean, they're great kids. (22:25 - 25:54) But these kids would very often still be in the same clothes that they wore. That was just the way they lived in the bush. And that's not an insult to these people. I mean, they loved their families. They lived a completely different lifestyle in the warm months than they did throughout the year. But it's true, they wore the same clothes. And yes, the teachers had all of those difficulties, because you had two completely different lifestyles. Life in the bush, hunter-gatherer style, is completely different from the modern life. And that's always been the dilemma that the people who were trying to figure out, well, how do we help people make this transition into the modern world, had? So that's just a little bit of anecdotal information. But I'll just add to that by saying I have another little anecdote from when I was even younger. And I was a high school student on a interprovincial visit. This was a forerunner to Kimovic. The idea is you went to Quebec, and you lived with a French family, and learned to speak French. And then they came to your home and learned to speak English. Anyway, there was a boy my age, I think I was 16 or 17 at the time. And he was an Indian. And he was at the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg. And I remember that very well. It was on Wellington Crescent in Winnipeg. And I really liked him. We became good friends. And he was studying to become a minister. Now, we haven't kept in touch. I have no idea if he did or not. But what I'm saying here is that he was a completely integrated, educated, articulate person. And he still he was an Indian. He called himself Soto, and he was proud of his Indian heritage. But he was an example of a person who had completely integrated. And so he was what the residential schools were trying to accomplish, I believe. And a final example, just briefly, as I live in Manitoba, our premier is Indigenous. And so here you have this highly accomplished, educated person. But you can go online and watch him doing his various Indigenous dances. He's like, he's really good at it. And so this is an example, I believe, of exactly the type of person that residential schools, the people who designed residential schools were trying to produce. A person who is proud of their Indian heritage, but at the same time is completely integrated into the modern Canadian economy, and a person who feels that sees themselves first and foremost as a Canadian. And I believe that and we agree with that entirely. But that's not the direction we seem to be heading these days. Now, before we get into debunking the mass graves narrative, I think we have to discuss briefly the history of how that whole narrative started. Now, my understanding is it really started with Chief Roseanne Casimir in May of 2021, who made the claim that there were 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School. (25:54 - 29:22) Is that where it started? Or did it start before that? Well, actually, it started long before that. And people, I think, assumed when that claim was made, that it just sort of came out of the blue. I said, well, where did that come from? Well, actually, those stories had been circulating in Indian communities, Indigenous communities, for many years. And I'll take a minute to describe that if you like. There had always been, I'm sure, kids tell each other ghost stories. I can imagine some little Indian kids in a dormitory late at night, sort of a bit scared and lonely, telling each other ghost stories about, you know, particularly the priests and nuns. If you saw a nun walking around in a, you know, sort of a black costume, it looks sort of like a vampire, I suppose. But anyway, so there'd always been stories like that. And stories about priests killing children and throwing them on down the stairs and forcing little children to bury the kids, all of that type of thing. They were all there. And I'll just tell you one of these stories just to show you how silly they were. And I think you would agree, one of the famous stories, this is told by one of the fellows who went to the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the 1960s, name was William Combes. And he's dead now. But he told the story of the queen who came to Canada and came to the residential school at Kamloops and kidnapped 10 children, and they were never seen again. Okay, now you and I would say, well, how can anybody possibly believe such a story? And by the way, it is true that the queen did come to Canada in 1964, although she never did go to BC, and she certainly didn't kidnap any children. But you'd wonder, well, how can anybody believe such a story? But if you go online, you can check this out. There are numerous fact checks on this story that continue until today. Reuters and Snopes have all done fact checks, you know, basically saying, well, no, this didn't happen. But the fact that they would actually have to fact check such an odd story, when an educated person wouldn't possibly believe it, is very interesting. But what happened is this very odd fellow was still around, named Kevin Annett, came around. Now, this is a fellow who had been kicked out of his United Church position. He was a minister in Cornell, Burnie, BC. He started to tell his congregation very frightening tales of, at one point, it was 250,000 Indian children who were buried between church walls all across Canada, and that type of story. And they're just increasingly crazy stories. Now, I have never met the man. I don't know if, I can't say anything much about him, except that he's completely unhinged. But he gained quite a following. And you can go online and watch him, particularly, or you can read his books. He's read many books. He's done many interviews. (29:22 - 30:42) His most famous production is a documentary called Unrepentant. Now, this documentary, I'd recommend to your viewers that they watch it, because, oh, he's very convincing. He even had people like Noam Chomsky call him a hero and saying he's exposing all of these myths. But what happened is all of these stories that he would tell, he would go to these people like William Combes and other people who had been at the Kamloops School, and he met these people on the east side of Vancouver, where they were struggling with alcoholism and homelessness, etc. And they would tell him these stories. And then he would put these stories into much more sophisticated language. And as I say, he writes very well, and he's very, very, very persuasive. So all of those stories are there. The story about the children buried in the apple orchards, various apple orchards across Canada, the stories about priests clubbing children to death and then forcing six-year-olds to bury them and that sort of thing, all those stories are there. (30:42 - 35:32) But no one would have believed them before Kevin Annett came on the picture and started making it his life's work to spread these stories. Okay, but those Kevin Annett stories would still have remained on the margins of the internet. You can find almost anything on the margins of the internet. But what happened next was that for some reason, and I don't know why this is, the TRC commissioners, at least Murray Sinclair and Marie Wilson, decided that these stories were true. Now, this happened, and I won't go through all of the connections here, but there's an MP, former MP named Gary Merasty, and you can read this in the Globe and Mail, by the way, this is in Gary Merasty, watch Unrepentant. That's the document made by Kevin Annett that I've recommended that your viewer watch. He became convinced that this was true. And he went into Parliament, he spoke about this, and this is all on public record. And he then was able to convince the people who were setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that this should be investigated. And that's how Murray Sinclair and Marie Wilson in particular, I don't know about Little Shulk, because he said very little about this. I don't know if he believes any of this nonsense. But in any event, they became convinced that there were these thousands and thousands of these missing or disappeared children from residential schools. There's no factual basis for it. There's nothing in history books. But they took it upon themselves to launch this inquiry. This was not within their TRC mandate. This is not within the mandate that the government had given them. As a matter of fact, they wanted money to get to hire people to go on this wild goose chase. That's my term for the wild goose chase. And the government refused permission to do so. I've spoken to some of the people involved here of the late Chuck Straw, etc. There are many people involved in this. But what happened is they basically, the government said, no, you can't have this money. But the TRC went on this wild goose chase by themselves. And then you had these people, you had Murray Sinclair, regularly going on, and I don't want to speak disrespectfully of the dead. He was wonderful in many ways. But in this one, where he became convinced of this, that this conspiracy theory was actual fact, he went very badly wrong. He would go on CBC, he would go on APTN, that's Aboriginal People's Television Network. He would talk about all of these thousands of missing children and hint darkly about sinister deaths and secret burials and that sort of thing. And that's where the people like these people at the Kamloops community, that's, these stories then became not just Kevin Annett internet memes, these became sort of almost like official government policy because they were promoted as truth. So what I'm saying is I'm sort of giving an excuse to Roseanne Casimir and the people at Kamloops, because when they made these claims about the priests secretly burying the children and forcing six-year-olds to help bury them and that sort of thing, like these are nonsense claims, but they absolutely believed them at the time. I think that's changed. I think they know by now that these are, they dug themselves into a hole, pardon the pun, and they don't know how to get out of it. But when they made the claim, it's not a hoax. Some people say, well, this is a hoax. Well, at that time when these claims were made, these indigenous communities absolutely believed these stories. And that's because the TRC commissioners had given those stories validity. So what I'm telling you here is that the TRC was largely responsible for creating all of these myths about the thousands of missing children. So by the time it got to the Kamloops, it was almost inevitable that this type of claim would be made. And then once Kamloops made their claim, then of course it went to Williams Lake and went to all sorts of other communities where they said, yes, we also know there are stories in the community about all these secretly buried children. So we want money to search for that too. So that's my view of that. (35:33 - 39:04) So let me sum that up very briefly then, because if I understand everything you've just told us, Brian, this, the validity that has been given to this narrative by our government, by certain officials is based entirely upon the TRC giving credibility to the claims of Kevin Annette, who went and talked to some native homeless people and spun what they told him into better stories. And so if that's correct, this entire narrative is based upon the extremely questionable testimony of one person. Yes, that's basically true. And all of this was amplified all the way through by government officials who gave all of this stuff that was being said validity, and particularly by the CBC, because CBC reported these things as fact. And when, for instance, Murray Sinclair went on their interviews and said, there may be up to, I think he said one time, 3,200, 10 times as many, maybe 10 times as many missing children, that's 32,000. Nobody questioned him when he said at a later time, 6,000, maybe five times as many. Again, the CBC reporters in particular, and I pick on them because they're the ones that are well-funded and they have the ability to do investigative work, they chose not to, would agree. Or after the Kamloops claim, when Sinclair said 15,000 to 25,000, maybe more children, just like the Kamloops ones, which he believed were secretly buried there. This is what did it. And the other commissioner, Marie Wilson, also spoke, or at one point led on that she was speaking to the thousands of missing children or disappeared children that she said were there. So I do not understand this. These are very intelligent, educated people. And I do not understand how they could fall for something that was so obviously really a conspiracy theory. But the fact is they did. They gave it the validity, and then the Kamloops people, when they found that there were some soil anomalies that might fit the pattern of graves, they jumped on this because they absolutely believed all of these stories by that time. Just to make this one point, there's two people in the Kamloops community right now who say that they were the six-year-olds who were forced to dig the graves. So they would go and they would go to the place where the graves were supposedly. And I don't mean to make light of this, but I mean, these people are fantasizing because they obviously were not six-year-olds who were forced to dig graves for their comrades. But they believe it, and the people in their community believe it, or at least some of the more gullible members. I'm convinced that there's many very wise people in the Kamloops community, Indian community, who have not really believed these stories since they were first made. But those people have chosen to remain silent. (39:05 - 41:26) And so many of the people have chosen not to say anything. You've got the Catholic bishops who are being accused of throwing babies in incinerators and killing children and secretly burying them. And they're so afraid of offending Indigenous sensibilities that they, or interfering with what they view to be reconciliation, that they just keep their mouths shut and they throw their comrades under the bus. And I don't understand any of that, but that's what's happening. And one claim I wanted to make about that, this whole idea that six-year-olds were forced to dig graves. Well, anybody who's ever tried to dig a large hole, and believe me, I've done it, a six-year-old cannot dig a large hole. They're not physically strong enough to do that. Once you get down more than a couple of inches, the dirt's so hard that there's no way a six-year-old could push a shovel in or swing a pick to do that. It's clearly a false claim because it's just not physically possible. But clearly, people in our government bought all of this because in 2022, subsequent to Chief Kazimir's statement in 2021, NDP MP Leah Ghazan put a motion before the government to recognize Canada's residential schools as genocide, and it passed with unanimous consent. And this is something I've spoken to my Conservative representatives around, and many of us have in our group, and we do not understand this because those people are sensible politicians. They know that Canada did not commit a genocide. They know that these stories, I can tell you personally, they know that these stories are nonsense. But those are politics in Canada today where you have people who know much better refusing to acknowledge the truth. I don't know if you follow, I'll just bring up this extraneous one because it's in the news, but there's a lawyer named Jim Heller in British Columbia, and he has asked his law society to simply, because they keep putting out literature that the graves were discovered at Kamloops, and all he asks is that they put potential graves, potential, and they're fighting this. (41:27 - 43:01) This is the law society. I'm ashamed. I'm a lawyer. I'm ashamed of these people. But that's how deep this has gone, where the groups, universities, politicians, even law societies are afraid to simply tell the truth. They're so afraid of offending Indigenous sensibilities. It's hard to understand. It's a very unusual hysteria, which is happening in Canada, but that's where we're at today. And it seems to me that the public would be largely unaware of all of this had it not been for A, as you pointed out, the CBC flagging it continually as fact when they've verified no such thing, but also a few days after MP Gossam's motion, Justin Trudeau orders the flags on all government buildings to be lowered to half mast where they stayed for six months. He pledges $320 million for investigation to this, and then subsequently pledges $40 billion. Let me tell you how the claim should have been handled, if I can, because the May 27th, 2021 claim by Chief Roseanne Casimir was that the fact that the claim was going to be made was actually given to the government, the federal government, as well as reporters well in advance of the claim. So they all had a chance to check into this claim. (43:02 - 46:01) And Mark Miller was the Indian Affairs Minister responsible. So what his office should have done is at the very least, when he knew that there was going to be a claim that the remains of 215 children had been found, he should have at the very least, his staff should have said, what do you mean remains of 215 children? All you're saying is you've got a ground penetrating radar report. That doesn't detect bodies or remains or graves. All that does is detect soil anomalies. So Mark Miller should have at the very least, and his office should have at very least, they could have nipped this in the bud, as could any competent reporter. Any competent reporter would have said, well, just a minute. They would have asked questions like, okay, just a minute now, where are the remains? Same question that Miller should have asked. Then they should have said, well, just a minute, 215 children disappeared from the schools. Well, do you have any police reports or other reports about parents wondering where their children had gone? Because there weren't any such things. So what you had is kind of, and I call it a hysteria, because I think that's what it is. The reporters, many of whom are more, say, social justice advocates than journalists, wanted this story to be true, and they didn't even bother inquiring into the truth of it. Then they all made things much worse in the media. They started talking about mass graves, the New York Times put out by a fellow named Austin, a story they still haven't taken down about mass graves discovered at Kamloops. The government, as you say, we had Trudeau immediately lowering flags across Canada on all federal buildings, kneeling in a cemetery, I'll talk about that one if you like, with a teddy bear, and then promising these poor indigenous communities $320 million. All they had to do is make a similar claim, and of course, everybody did. You've got people right now searching all over the place for phantom children that never existed, and they're being given huge amounts of money. Kamloops already spent $12 million, and they haven't put one shovel in the ground. How they've managed to spend that money is anybody's guess. I think there will be fraud charges coming at some point, not with this government, but I think that they'll have to consider that type of thing. Williams Lake has spent something like $8 million on similarly preposterous claims. You've got all of these communities making these claims, spending taxpayers' money, going through it like water. (46:02 - 51:16) Billions being spent on these projects, and you didn't mention UNDRIP. UNDRIP was passed because of this. That's why it was passed. You didn't mention the fact that as a result of this claim, everybody who went to school, every Indian kid who went to school has been paid now. They were all compensated the same amount as residential school payments. In some cases, that can be huge. That can be a quarter of a million dollars. The irony is that the only people who didn't get any money out of this were the Indian kids who never went to a school. They've never been compensated, but everybody else has. The total amount of spending is astronomical. Our grandchildren are going to be paying for these things for many years to come, and it's basically wasted money. It has not improved the lot of the poor Indigenous people at all. They're still stuck in the same rut they've been in forever. Exactly who's getting all of this money? I suspect that probably most aren't even Indigenous people. You've got universities. You've got all kinds of people that are gorging on this money. It's an absolute travesty. I think people will find all of this out. I have been recommending, and I don't think I'm alone in this, that we're going to have a public inquiry into the whole boondoggle, if you like. I think at some point, because Pierre Pulliam has committed to a full investigation, so I'm hoping that at some point we're going to have a public inquiry that goes in detail into this whole thing, because it is a travesty what has happened. As to where all that money is going, Brian, I'm going to place a link, folks, beneath this interview to my previous interview with Professor Frances Widdowson, the author of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry. If you want to know where all that money is going, she'll explain it to you. But that's too big of a subject to get into right now. Brian, it sounds like you do have an interesting story, though, about this image of Trudeau kneeling with a teddy bear in a cemetery. I'm intrigued. I'm sure the viewers are. This was at the Cowessess Cemetery, and very soon after the claim about the 250 supposed children at Kamloops, we had these great big CBC stories about 750 unmarked graves being discovered at Cowessess. The joke is that I hope you are not offended by the fact that I'm adopting a bit of humor here, but the joke is that this was a cemetery, and the CBC was claiming that this was a terrible thing. We had 750 secret graves discovered. You had a very wise Indigenous chief, Sophie Pierre, I think her name was, come out and say, well, what do you expect to find? This is a cemetery. Of course you find graves at a cemetery, and they were the graves of white people, Indigenous people, children, adults, etc. So you had all this hysteria over an ordinary cemetery, and here you have Justin Trudeau kneeling in the cemetery with a teddy bear. I mean, it's almost too ridiculous for words, but that's what we've been through. Yes. Now, I want to get on now to the debunking of this mass graves claim, because not only has there been no evidence brought forward to support it, there's been a great deal of evidence to deny it. I'd like to read a few things here, if you'll bear with me for a minute. One of them is a direct quote from one of your articles, and it's in regards to the Kamloops Residential School, where you said, not one of the many Indian bands who sent children to the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, including the Kamloops band itself, has ever come forward with the name of a single child who allegedly went to the school and never returned, and for whom the band has been looking ever since. Not one. So first, we have the complete absence of testimony from the parents of the children who went there. We also have the fact that the Kamloops band has repeatedly refused to have any of those supposed graves exhumed, and I would suspect that the reason why is because of Pine Creek School in Manitoba, where they dug up 14 graves and found nothing but piles of rocks. There's one more thing here that I want to talk about, and it's another quote. Now known as the Woodland Cultural Center, Brantford's former Mohawk Institute Residential School is the focus of many rumors on marked graves. To date, there has been extensive use of ground-penetrating radar, over 1,000 test pits dug by archaeologists across the large property, as well as $50,000 worth of lidar. Nothing has been found. So any solid evidence that we have, any actual investigation, has found nothing. (51:17 - 1:01:14) Yeah, and they won't find anything. I'm sure that there were priests who were bad priests. I'm sure that there were nuns who were bad nuns and ministers and teachers, but this whole notion that there were thousands of students who were somehow met sinister deaths at residential schools and were secretly buried is nonsense. We have history books, and history books make it very clear what happened. You had children who died, a very sad thing, but deaths, particularly from tuberculosis and influenza 100 years ago and more, were quite common. Now, the Indian populations, for various reasons, were particularly susceptible to both of those diseases. Influenza, because they had not yet required the immunity that exposure to living with white people brings, so many indigenous people from the remote areas died from influenza, particularly during the 1918-20 Spanish flu epidemic. Entire northern villages were decimated, so it shouldn't be surprising that children also got influenza at residential schools. But tuberculosis was also a much bigger problem on reserves, particularly prairie and northern reserves, and that has to do with a combination of factors. But as I mentioned, the loss of the buffalo deprived them of their normal protein supply, and then they were terribly poor. The federal government is required to actually deliver rations to these reserves. They were very poor, and sanitation was a very big problem. You had Indian families living 10 or 12 to a one-room cabin. Just imagine how quickly tuberculosis would spread in a home like that, and particularly when sanitation was very poor. So there definitely were kids who got sick at residential schools and died. That's not a secret, and they would be astounding if that didn't happen. But this idea that residential schools killed children while the reserves were safe, healthy places is just not true. Dr. Peter Bryce was the chief medical examiner at the time. He is usually quoted as the person who talked about how terrible tuberculosis was at both residential schools and reserves at the time. He did a famous study, and he studied eight Indian communities, children sending their children to residential schools. So these were all kids who had never seen a residential school yet. They had never set foot in a residential school. Every one of those children tested positive for tuberculosis, every one of them. So this just shows how high the tuberculosis rate was on reserves at the time. Now, not every one of those kids would go on to develop the full-blown symptoms, but yes, a considerable number died. In actual fact, only 423 died right at the schools, and that's a fairly low number. But then TRC added on all of the children who died within a year of leaving the school, and some of that is fair. But the point is that it wasn't residential schools that killed those children. It was tuberculosis, and the TRC commissioners made a very dishonest comparison when they compared the death rates at residential schools to mainstream schools, because it was known even at the time that the rates on reserves, tuberculosis rates, were so very much higher. What they should have been comparing is the death rate at residential schools to the death rate on reserves. And when you do that, you find that there's no difference. The children from reserves with high tuberculosis death rates died at a much higher rate than the kids from other communities, and that's just a fact of life. So this has been distorted to say that, well, residential schools were just killing children. That's not the case at all. Those very old 19th century buildings were definitely bad for the spread of disease, and the government took great pains to, when this became an issue, to try to improve health facilities, even to the point of having the kids sleep outside in tents in winter, which is kind of interesting in some of the schools. So what happened is that the death rates at the residential schools steadily declined, but the death rates on the reserves really didn't decline until the of antibiotics during or after the Second World War. So the fact is, yes, children did die, but the astounding thing would be if nobody died, of course they died. Children died of diseases in those days. It's just a sad fact of life. And I can confirm all of that. I was a paramedic in my youth, and as late as the 1980s, when I was working on the Glacier and Blackfoot Reserve east of Calgary, there was active tuberculosis there. And I'm not aware of anyone having died from it, but certainly there were children who were getting sick, people who were getting sick with tuberculosis. And because they did have access to modern medicine, that's probably the reason why they weren't dying from it, but certainly it was still there. Whereas among the non-native population, that's a disease that's been gone for a long time. So certainly that is a problem, or at least it was. I don't know if it still is. I mean, that was some 40 years ago that I was doing that. But you raised another really good point about this whole narrative about these mass graves. Where are the police? The RCMP were given an additional $5 million to investigate this, and yet they have done next to nothing. And I think you have a very good theory about why. Well, I'll start by saying, I think if the RCMP had simply gone on to the reserve when there were these claims made about the deaths, after all the Indian leaders were saying that this was a crime scene and that this was a major crime, which it would be, by the way, this would have been the biggest crime in Canadian history. If the RCMP had gone on to the reserve and done an investigation, I believe that it would have taken them about an hour or two hours to determine that there was nothing to this claim. First of all, they would have broadcast the fact that no human remains, graves or bodies were discovered, only soil anomalies, which can be anything. But I also think that they would have found out very quickly that the entire narrative was false. It wouldn't even have been necessary for them to dig. If it had, what they would have discovered, by the way, and we know this, is that they would have discovered evidence of previous excavations and the most likely one being clay tiles from a 1924 septic installation at the which the inexperienced person doing the ground penetrating radar mistook to be graves. They weren't graves, they were from that. But in any event, I think that the RCMP could very quickly have determined that there was nothing to this claim. And as I say, the minister, Mark Miller, should have made that determination earlier and all of the reporters, particularly the CBC reporters should have done that. But the police could have done that very easily. They didn't. Why not? Well, what we know now is that they were called off from the highest level. What we know now is that a so-called reporter from the Globe and Mail, Tanya Tolaga, somehow got in touch with Murray Sinclair. And Murray Sinclair, exactly who he called and how he did this, I'm not exactly sure. We don't know and we will never know. But the police then called off their, they didn't do an investigation. They had a file open, but they actually did not do an investigation. What they did is they said, we're going to get off the reserve and it's up to the people at Kamloops to do their own investigation, which is unheard of in Canadian history. Nothing like that has ever been done. Kamloops is a part of Canada. The RCMP have the responsibility to investigate crime there. They abdicated that responsibility. So I believe what this is, is evidence of political corruption at the highest level. And in my day, I have great respect for the RCMP. I worked with them very closely for well over three decades as a judge and nothing like this would have happened. (1:01:14 - 1:02:20) They would have done their investigation and they would have done it honestly. And then they would have reported to the Canadian public. And I'm quite sure in this case, what they would have said is, we've investigated and these claims are not warranted. Don't worry about it. Nothing bad has happened here. So the RCMP are the third spoke in this wheel. And in my opinion, they have badly, badly let down Canadian people. They could have prevented this claim from going forward with just a routine investigation. And I can't prove who said what to whom, but we do know that Mark Miller was very much involved. We know that he reported to Justin Trudeau. And we know that discussions must have taken place at the highest level of the RCMP. So if they had simply let their police officers do their job in an ordinary way, we would not be in this position in Canada today. (1:02:20 - 1:06:23) We would not have spent untold billions of dollars investigating a false claim. And I think we would have been a less divided society. Brian, you've done a wonderful job of summing up the history, of putting everything in context, of explaining how this narrative took hold. And I think of debunking this notion that there are all these mass graves out there. I also want to talk to you about the conditions at the schools, because you're paying a lot of claims made about that, about the conditions being terrible. And you can see lots of pictures of students at these schools, and they're all well-dressed and smiling, and they look very happy. But of course, someone could argue, well, you're setting up a picture. So of course, they've been instructed to do that. But you made four statements in your articles. And if you would bear with me for a minute, I'd like to read them, because they paint a very different picture of these schools. Acclaimed playwright and writer, Thompson Highway, graduated at the top of his class. In his book, Perpetual Astonishment, Highway described the time he spent at residential schools as, nine of the best years of my life. Len Marchand, you made reference to him earlier, the first status Indian federal cabinet minister, transferred to the Kamloops Indian Residential School by his own choice in 1949. In his autobiography, he explicitly refused to say anything negative about the school, his only complaint being that the potatoes were watery. Three indigenous teachers were on staff in 1962, when the CBC filmed a documentary at the Kamloops School. None of them complained about anything untoward, either then or later. By 1973, half of the staff at the Kamloops Residential School was indigenous, and none of these indigenous staff members complained of anything untoward at the school, neither then nor later. So what we have is either an absence of any negative comments from people who were educated in these schools, or several instances of people saying it was an excellent experience. So what do you think the conditions were really like? Well, it is interesting because if you look at what people who have actually attended the schools say, some of them will certainly say, well, it was a bad experience, but many of them are like this. They're very positive about it, very, very grateful for being able to attend. But then if you get into what their children and their grandchildren, the great-grandchildren say, it's entirely different. So I think what we have here is over the years, there's been a tendency to exaggerate more and more and more. And until you get to these extreme claims like priests killing children and secretly burying them, and part of this is definitely the money motive. The AFN, that's the Assembly of Chiefs, has been on this issue because they've realized right from the beginning that this is a huge moneymaker for them. And I don't want to suggest that for all of these people, money is the only motive, but it's one of the big ones. The shrewd AFN leadership, if you remember the RCAP, the World Commission on Aboriginal People, that was the initial Aboriginal type of inquiry. That didn't bring all that much money, but it did recommend that the government study the Truth and Reconciliation part of this, in other words, residential school part of it, which they did. And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a huge moneymaker. Billions were spent in compensation. But the Indigenous leadership, what Francis Whittleson calls the Aboriginal industry, and I refer more directly as the Indian industry, that was an Indian fellow's term for it, Helen, realized that, well, we want to keep this going. (1:06:23 - 1:06:57) We want to keep this going. So they forced the launch of the Missing Women's Inquiry, which also spent very incompetently millions, millions of dollars, but it didn't generate any real income because their central premise, that violence to Indigenous women was a huge problem, was true. But the fact is that most of that violence came from Aboriginal men. (1:06:57 - 1:10:33) That's not the story they wanted to tell. So it wasn't a moneymaker. So somewhere along the line, somebody realized that they had to keep this money train going. And that's when you started to get these extreme claims about priests killing children and secretly burying them, etc. So I'm not saying that there was... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. I'm not saying that there was a definite plan here. But the whole business plan of the chiefs, unfortunately, and this has always been the case, is to get money from taxpayers. And this has been incredibly lucrative for them. They've managed to convince people that these stories are true. And even our foolish parliamentarians, as you've noted, all voted for that genocide, which is a travesty. This is a terrible thing. But that is part of it. The people that you've mentioned from my articles, I'll just add them out a bit. Because at the Kamloops School, many of the people in the residential schools were Indigenous people, teachers, maintenance workers, etc. So in the Kamloops School, the three teachers mentioned, one of them, Michelle, was actually a chief of his home community at the time he was a teacher. Jim McCrae, a former minister of justice in Manitoba, has written an excellent article on this, if anybody wants to read that. But he was a chief. He was a very accomplished man, by the way, very accomplished man. And he was a chief at the time he was employed at the school as a teacher, during exactly this time when supposedly these priests were killing children and teachers were killing children. Well, how nonsensical is that? And it's just preposterous. Len Marchand, a very distinguished man, and he spoke highly of the school. Tomson Highway, and I think in that article, it was a mistake, I think I said perpetual astonishment. It's Permanent Astonishment. And I recommend to your viewers that that's the single best book by far of any written by a person who attended a residential school. It's an excellent book, it gives all sides of it. And he is a very good writer. So it's a very enjoyable read. So for your viewers, if they want to have a really good book to read, Permanent Astonishment by Highway, Tomson is a very good one. So yeah, in actual fact, the legacy of residential schools is a mixed one, because they did many things wrong. And many children who went there had very bad experiences. And I think there are a lot of explanations for that. But my child welfare explanation, I think, is worthy of study that these homes were, the schools were used for what they were not intended to be. They were intended to be just schools, and they were used as child welfare institutions. That was a mistake. And that caused a lot of problems. But you also had people from stable homes, and primarily the Indians from stable homes, who did very well at residential schools. And the original intentions of John A. Macdonald, for instance, and the residential school proponents, was to create an educated Indigenous elite, chiefs, and etc. politicians. They accomplished their purpose. (1:10:33 - 1:11:35) And if you look at the backgrounds of people like Wab Kanu, and these very accomplished Indigenous people, very often, what you find is, at the bottom of it, there's somebody who went to residential school. Murray Sinclair, who I explained, made a terrible mistake when he somehow fell into this conspiracy theory. But he was a very accomplished man. And his grandmother, who raised him, and who he credits for being really the inspiration that he needed, she was in a residential school, and she was very positive about her experience there. So it's a mixed bag, but it's just not true to say that the entire residential school history is entirely negative. It's not. It's mixed. There are positives as well as negatives. Senator Lynn Beyak tried to say exactly what I just said now, and she was run out of town. (1:11:35 - 1:13:05) She was kicked out of the Senate, and she's a wonderful woman, and she was treated just terribly just for saying that the TRC report is not a balanced report. And they should have talked about the good as well as the bad that came from residential schools. And I do have to ask this question. The TRC report was written by people who believed that thousands of children had been murdered, that a genocide had been committed. And how could a report like that possibly be balanced? And I think Canadians are going to have to do a whole rethink of all of what they had been told and what they believed. Is this idea of endless reconciliation money with land acknowledgements and all of this thing, is this where we should be headed? Or should we be trying to have a country that has one class of citizen and doesn't have a divided society with a semi-apartheid system built in the middle of it, or tribal areas hived off into sort of semi-autonomous little nations? So I think Canadians are going to have to rethink of all of this, and I'm actually hoping that's going to happen. (1:13:06 - 1:15:59) If I can try to summarize what you've said there about the quality of these schools and what it was like going there. If we absent from our sort of survey those children who were placed there as a substitute for social intervention, and we just look at the kids who went there voluntarily, whose parents sent them there, which is of course the rest of them. We get statements anywhere from it was the best experience of my life to I hated it. But how is this any different than asking any Canadian child throughout the generations who've gone to a public school, what their experience was? Yeah, well, exactly right. And that is really what I remember from my first few decades, at least as a judge. As I mentioned, there were a lot of articles written about residential schools, and there is a particularly good one in what was the old Western Report by a fellow by the name of Patrick Donnelly. And it was interviews with dozens and dozens of indigenous people who actually went to residential schools. This was done in the early 1990s before it became so political. And you had a split, as you have just mentioned, you had a split between people saying, you know, this is a bad time for me and the food was no good and the nuns were too strict and that sort of thing. At the same time, you had other people saying, you know, this was a great experience. I'm really glad I was able to go. And when I came back, I was educated, whereas the other kids who stayed home weren't. So it was a mixed bag. And this narrative that everything about residential schools was horrible, even the word atrocities now is sort of tossed around. It's simply untrue. It's simply untrue. And all you have to do is go look at some of the older material. Don't look at the essays that are written by people who are getting, you know, grants to write about how horrible residential schools are. Go to some of the actual sources. Nina Green, who is a researcher in our group, has put together a, it's from the Chronicles, Sister Chronicles. It's in Dorchester Review. And it has the day-to-day accounts from the nuns who actually worked at these schools, at a particular school in the North long ago. And it talks about the day-to-day life at the schools. You know, that was in a time when Canada was very, you know, it was a poor country and these were very poor Indian kids. (1:15:59 - 1:17:53) But the care that these nuns gave to these children is absolutely astounding. These nuns, particular nuns, took a vow to sort of put themselves in the place of the mothers of these Indian children. Many of those parents had been wiped out by disease. So the parents weren't there. And these kids were actually orphans at the school. A few people know that after the Spanish flu epidemic, the number of orphans, Indian orphans, just mushroomed because there were so many dead parents. And you needed two parents to take care of you at that time. But so these historical accounts all exist. If people just want to take the time to go and look at them and don't look at the propaganda, look at the actual history, do a little research, I think what you'd find is that it is a mixed bag. Some people had good experiences. Some people did not have good experiences. But it is not what we have been told, that these were little hugs of horrors or something like that. It was people that were doing their best to give an education to Indian children. Many of the teachers at these schools alternated between public schools and residential schools. So they were exactly the same teachers. So they weren't a particular class of mean people or anything like that. Yes, there were bad priests. I'm sure there were bad nuns. But most of them were very decent people, just as they are now. There's no difference between people in that generation and our generation, except they perhaps might have been willing to live a little differently, live a little less comfortably than we do now. But it is a slander of these people. (1:17:53 - 1:19:11) Some of the anti-Catholic stuff that we're hearing today is particularly disturbing. I make the point in an upcoming article that we read about the blood libel, the one that rabbis were killing little Christian children for their blood to make unleavened bread. How is that different for some of these awful stories that we're hearing about priests killing little Indian children and forcing their comrades to bury them, et cetera? This anti-Catholic bigotry is really no different from that anti-Semitic Jewish blood libel. So we Canadians better give ourself a headache when we're reading this stuff and sort of accepting this. This is bad stuff. And we should be getting at the truth, doing as Aliyev says, we should get at the truth, historical accuracy, and investigation. That's where we should be headed. Right. And so the conclusion that we can draw is that if you look at the statements from people who went to those schools and who do not have an agenda, what we get is a picture of a school system that was no better or no worse than the other Canadian public schools. (1:19:12 - 1:20:34) Well, yes, I think that's right. I wouldn't say that a lot of these Indian kids would have particular problems adjusting to the kind of regimentation and discipline that we expected growing up. That was part of our upbringing. The Indian kids didn't have that. In many cases, the idea of physical discipline was just not something that happened. The idea, as I said, of just sitting at a desk all day long, that's not something they did. Their hunting culture was very different, where you watched your father or you watched your brothers and sisters, your mother doing something. That's how you learned. So the idea of going to a school and being put into a school, I think that would have been pretty traumatic, pretty frightening for a lot of kids. So in that respect, it was different because they came from a different culture. But I would also argue that having some kind of school, some kind of formal education, was absolutely essential. We could not have done otherwise. We could not have simply said, okay, well, you are people from a hunting gathering culture, and so just keep your ways and do whatever you want. Don't bother learning to read or write. That would have been child abuse. (1:20:35 - 1:24:41) I think that would have been child abuse, and I don't think we could have done that. So there was going to be some dislocation, some discomfort, regardless of how we did it. But generally, what I am saying is that the people who worked at these residential schools were no different from the people who worked at other schools and other seminaries. They were just as good or bad as those people. And the people who came up with the idea for educating Indian children did their best. They thought differently than we do nowadays. They had different attitudes, but they were doing their best to try to find a system that would help bring Indian people into the modern world. Right. Now, Brian, I'd like to finish up with a discussion of why all of this narrative has become so widely accepted and why it's being pushed. And we've sort of alluded to it, but let me summarize a few things. We've got certain factors, such as the TRC deck was stacked with people who were buying the narrative, who just assumed that it was true. We have the RCMP being called off. We've got the CBC just continually pushing this without actually doing any investigative journalism on it. And we've spoken about the Aboriginal industry that is the title of Dr. Frances Widdowson's book. And you made allusion to the fact that a lot of this money ends up going into the hands of crooked chiefs, which it does. Some of it does. Very little of the money ever gets to the people it's supposed to help. The other place where all that money goes, and this is part of what she means by the Aboriginal industry, is into the pockets of lawyers and activists, white lawyers and activists who are making up like bandits and therefore have every reason to continue to push this narrative. And I think this is why it's infected the law societies. That's a big part of the reason there. So we've got that element of it. But then another thing, and you had said before, I didn't ask you about this and I didn't ask you because I was leaving it till the end, UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which, and I've done a number of interviews with people on this, and I think most notably with Indigenous lawyer Leighton Grey, where we talked about the fact that it is a method for outside forces, globalist forces if you like, to seize control of Canadian lands and resources by leveraging this whole narrative. And he even said, Leighton said to me in one interview, and I can't give you the details on this, but he said, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories are one legal pen stroke away from ceding control of lands and resources to the Indigenous Peoples, to the First Nations. So if, and we've already, I think, well outlined the fact that the First Nations themselves are not making these decisions. They're being manipulated. So if somebody's manipulating them to get control through UNDRIP, and I'm not asking you to, I'm not putting words in your mouth. This is me summarizing the things that I've learned in previous interviews. I'm just wanting your thoughts on it. So if this whole UNDRIP is, yes, a strategy to gain control of our lands and resources by outside forces, to do so through manipulating the First Nations Peoples, what better way to have Canadians become compliant with that than making us feel a national guilt over a genocide that didn't happen? Yeah, and it just happens that I have an article today or yesterday, I think it's in the Epoch Times on this subject. In other words, on ceding sovereignty to tribal groups. Now, why are we doing this and what is the effect? And I put this into the, I speak of this in reference to Donald Trump's demands that we improve our security, particularly our northern security. And here we are basically giving away sovereignty, Nunavut, Haida Gwaii, etc. And Leighton and Frances are, I believe, exactly right on this. (1:24:42 - 1:25:23) And Michelle Stirling also does a lot of writing on this. And I think people might find it very interesting. But what is happening? Why are we being told that we should feel so guilty about imagined parts of our history, that we are going to cede sovereignty to other groups that may well be influenced by others? And exactly who is doing this influencing? And we've had Terry Glavin and Sam Cooper tell us a little bit about Chinese, communist Chinese infiltration. (1:25:24 - 1:27:11) And I don't pretend to be well versed on all of that, because it's obviously very complicated. But I think we're doing things very badly in this country. And I think we have to give things complete rethink. Why would we be reintroducing tribal law, for instance, in Canada? With the treaty making process and a thousand years of enlightenment, we've done so much to try to undo the tribal view and get to the idea of individual rights and liberal democracy. Why would we be ceding democracy to basically tribes? So I'm hoping that whenever another government comes along, this whole idea of UNDRIP and semi-autonomous nations and Indigenous people as somehow completely different from everybody else and in a separate legal category, we've got to rethink that or this country is not going to stay together. I believe in a Canada that is a one Canada where you have one class of citizens, and it's not based on your racial or ethnic characteristics. If people want to read a really good book and really go into it, read Peter Best's There Is No Difference. And he will explain this in great detail. But we're headed down a very bad road here. The idea of different tribal groups having different rights. We even have Supreme Court decisions now that say that an Indian in a community will lose their charter protection and surrender it to tribal rights in certain cases. And we're headed down a very bad road here. (1:27:11 - 1:28:36) And I think we have to do a major rethink. I think this country might even be headed at some point to sort of a constitutional crisis. And we won't go into all of that now. We have forces at play. We have Alberta, we have Quebec, we have an entirely new United States dynamic. But I think we might be headed for constitutional discussion at that point. What I think we should be doing is saying, look, does this make any sense to have a completely different category of people? We have normal Canadians, and then we have Indian people, not only in a different category, but also regarded as members of a tribe or a collective instead of as individuals that we are looked at. Shouldn't we really be going to a country where we have one class of citizen, one kind of citizen, and compensate for lost land, all that sort of thing? That's fine. But let's get rid of all of that junk and get back to what we were originally intended to be, that is a country where we are all individuals and our citizenship rights are exactly alike, regardless of who our parents are or what their race or ethnic origin is. (1:28:36 - 1:28:41) Very well said, Brian. Thank you so much for your time today and for your excellent, perceptive articles.