Very quietly, the Canadian government has ended funding for a committee of experts formed to help Indigenous communities find unmarked graves at the former sites of religious residential schools. It marks the end of one of the most disgraceful moral panics in modern history.

In 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation made an announcement that radar technology had discovered over 200 human remains in unmarked graves near a Catholic “Indian residential school.” A wave of condemnation spread over the world. “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada,” reported the New York Times.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to half-staff to honor “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school.” In the following months, 20 announcements of soil “anomalies” discovered by radar near residential-school locations were announced. Soon, news articles about the residential-schools issue in Canada were positing the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves. This, in turn, led to waves of protest and a series of arsons that afflicted 24 churches over the next two years. Pope Francis visited, allowing himself to be used as a prop in the Canadian government’s staged punching of the church, so the government could effectively disclaim its own role in the residential-school system.

In 2021, while making a pro forma condemnation of church burnings, Trudeau still gave a tacit moral endorsement. “It’s real, and it is fully understandable given the shameful history we are all becoming more aware of,” he said. Then, he claimed, “people have gone decades and even generations living with intergenerational trauma, with outcomes and institutional racism that has created extreme difficulties for Indigenous peoples across this country that are also the legacy of residential schools.” The burned churches included those that serve First Peoples congregants today. Canada Day events were canceled as the nation faced what reporters solemnly called a “reckoning” with its settler-colonial and genocidal past.

There’s one problem. It was built on lies. In all the excavations that have been conducted, not a single unmarked grave has been found. Not one. This despite the fact that it would be expected that at some long-abandoned schools, where mortality rates in the late 19th century were abominably high, markers of graves had been lost to time and inattention.

This history was well-covered by a 2008–2015 inquiry by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which collected voluminous personal histories and documents on the residential-school system that Canada had operated for a century in conjunction with several religious bodies. The appalling health conditions at some schools are well known.

In the last year, criticism of a “mass graves hoax” perpetrated by progressive media and academia has given rise to a small scholarly industry devoted to defending the moral panic. Researchers have counted how often headlines used the phrase “mass graves,” versus the more modest and defensible “unmarked graves.” Through a tendentious process of disqualification they find just 35 percent of newspaper stories misled readers or provided inaccurate information. Thus they conclude, preposterously, that there wasn’t any “mass graves hoax” and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in “residential school denialism.”

That is a neat trick. But it reveals the depravity at work, which is not a concern for justice, but building up a black legend, through the progressive policing of language. The mission has been to absolve the progressive state and smear Canada’s last remaining conservative institutions in the present. We welcome Canada’s abandonment of this lie. We regret that it comes so late and without apologies.