Survivor accounts of residential schools vary — sometimes from the very same person. Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell told Nunatsiaq News in 2001 that her time at Akaitcho Hall was "a home-away-from-home" and that "it's not like what you're hearing about all the residential school issues today." In the same piece, she said, "At Akaitcho, we were in a structured environment compared to where we came from. That taught us perseverance and how to discipline ourselves." "It taught us a lot about doing things in life that we didn't always want to do, but those things had to be done ... We had to learn how to live with people from different cultures who spoke different languages and came from different parts of the NWT," she continued, adding that those friendships helped her political career.
Twenty-five years later, it was the same senator, now describing herself as a residential school "survivor," who stood in the Senate and introduced an amendment to Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, that proposed making residential school "denialism" a criminal offence.
On June 3, the Senate voted 41-32 against it, even though the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights had recommended it 7-1 two days earlier. Government representative Pierre Moreau told the chamber why it failed: no consultation with First Nations and Inuit communities, and no legal analysis of what the amendment would actually do.
The Assembly of First Nations didn't let it go. On July 15, chiefs at the AFN general meeting in Ottawa passed an emergency resolution demanding the government try again. Chief David Monias called it a matter of honouring survivors. Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige said the history "isn't up for debate," arguing hate-speech law is needed so denialism can no longer "prey upon survivors, their families, or our people." NDP MP Leah Gazan has a private member's bill on the same subject sitting in the Commons since 2024 — this fight isn't over just because the Senate voted once. …
The Criminal Code is supposed to tell citizens exactly what will land them in prison. "Downplaying" and "minimizing" do the opposite — they let prosecutors decide after the fact whether your opinion was a crime. That's not law. That's discretion wearing a badge, and discretion this broad always lands hardest on the unpopular and lightest on the well-connected.
Canada already has laws against harassment, intimidation, and the willful promotion of hatred. Those cover conduct that targets real people. Disagreeing with an official historical narrative isn't that, and pretending otherwise is how speech laws metastasize.
The answer to an argument you hate is a better argument, not a subpoena. If a historical claim is as strong as its defenders believe, it wins in open debate. If it needs the Criminal Code to win, that says something about the confidence of the case, not the guilt of the dissenter.
The Senate had it right in June. Moreau's objection — no consultation, no legal analysis — was really a polite way of saying the same thing this piece is arguing outright: nobody had actually worked out where the line falls, because there isn't one that can hold. The AFN will keep pushing, and Gazan's bill will probably come up for a vote eventually.
When it does, Parliament should give it the same denial the Senate already did.
In 2024, a mandatory course for B.C. lawyers referred to the “discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds” which “(confirmed) what survivors have been saying all along.” When one lawyer proposed a correction, as no graves were ever found, the B.C. Law Society publicly disparaged him. He sued for defamation — but now, the trial has been called off.
Instead, criminal defence lawyer Jim Heller settled his case with the law society, a development that was made public in a Glacier Media report on Monday. The terms are confidential. We won’t know what each side agreed to do to shelve the litigation, or who the court would have sided with in the end. Much like the supposed “graves” that the local First Nation refuses to excavate at the Kamloops residential school, the public won’t get any closure on this one.
“I feel like I’m escaping the looking glass,” Heller told me over the phone on Thursday. “I’m escaping Wonderland a little bit.”
Heller’s saga began when he spoke up about the wording in the Indigenous competency course mandated for all lawyers by the B.C. Law Society. As things stood back then, all members of the profession had to read through materials endorsed by their professional overseers to maintain the ability to practice — only, the course materials were objectively false. The thousands of professionals gatekeeping everything from real estate deals to criminal sentencing — professionals from which the next generation of B.C.’s judges would be drawn — were being told to internalize the unproven claim that the bodies of children were found at the Kamloops residential school grounds.
Attempts to contact those responsible for the course to spur a correction went ignored in the summer of 2024. Nevertheless, there was a democratic fix available. Heller and colleague Burnaby lawyer Mark Berry advanced a motion at the law society’s annual general meeting that fall, proposing the use of the words “potentially unmarked burial site” to more carefully reflect reality; they also moved to have the reference to 215 bodies of children removed, along with the assertion that the “discovery” confirmed what survivors had been saying.
In response, a group called the B.C. First Nations Justice Council released a statement calling Heller’s proposal a “Racist Resolution” that contains “alarming Residential School denialism.”
“It is unconscionable that efforts be made to revise this history and sanitize the genocidal atrocities committed against Indigenous people in B.C. and Canada,” it said.
The very next day, the B.C. Law Society published a news release about the B.C. First Nations Justice Council statement, adding its own commentary to the mix: “The resolution submitted by Mr. Heller and Mr. Berry only highlights the need for the (Indigenous course) and confirms much work remains to be done to increase knowledge and understanding, continue our efforts of advancing meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous people, and eliminate racism in our profession.”
The motion ultimately failed: while it had garnered support from 1,499 members of the law society, another 1,683 opposed it, with 590 abstentions.
That October, Heller began asking the law society to remove the statement about his motion from the website. He took it to be an accusation of racism. The law society didn’t budge, however, so he embarked on his lawsuit in February 2025.
Interestingly, Heller says that his Indigenous clients have been made aware of his efforts to correct the training materials, and the vast majority have been supportive: “We have good, good relationships and they understand the principles behind it.”
There were some interesting twists in the litigation. During the summer of 2025, the B.C. Law Society began filing documents in court to support its defence. Heller referred to these documents in an affidavit afterward — only to have it taken out of public view entirely. A judge sealed that affidavit in August 2025 to protect the privacy of a former law society employee who had personal and family experience with “colonialism, colonial harm, and the effect of Residential Schools.”
“I reject the notion that because a person chooses to share certain information about themselves or their families in a public context, that they have somehow waived their right to privacy over any related information, including information that may be shared in a personal, non-public context,” wrote the judge in his decision to seal the affidavit. “Here, it is apparent the information … was not intended for the public sphere.”
Evidently, an Indigenous employee of the law society had said something relevant to the matter at hand, but it wasn’t up to the public to know.
It was around this time that the B.C. Law Society began to retreat. In August 2025, it removed its disavowal of Heller from its website and changed the mandatory Indigenous course materials. The course currently speaks of “200 targets of interest at the Kamloops site that are probable burials.”
This was followed by an odd non-apology by the law society in May 2026, stating that, “To the degree it was understood by some to have defamed Mr. Heller, the Law Society wishes to confirm that was not its intention.”
Taken in context with the settlement, it’s a win for Heller. The B.C. Law Society, once staunch in standing by the falsities it had published, quietly retracted them right around the same time that litigation was heating up. There was smoke, but the fire of a public win was doused before it could ever shed light on the moral panic that gripped Canada in 2021.
(Sidebar: hardly a win. They knew that they couldn't win themselves.)
And who knows; perhaps the courts can’t be trusted to provide that anymore: it’s B.C. judges who keep allowing homeless people to claim property rights over public spaces like it’s the age of settlement; it’s B.C. judges who have begun blowing up the province’s land title system over historic grievances. Judges nationwide are provided training that predisposes them to siding with Indigenous causes. The cold reality is that the courts have political biases, and that testing them is a gamble.
But in other ways, old professional principles still work. Heller, a defence lawyer, took particular issue with the graves panic that hit Canada in 2021 because of how starkly it contrasted with the workings of a criminal trial. To prove someone’s guilt requires extensive evidence — and, in mounting a proper defence, the “devil might be in the details.” When it came to the graves and the accusations of an ongoing genocide, the country never got that treatment.
“My issue is just we’ve got to be truthful with our history with each other,” Heller said.
The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations waived a requirement that a Kamloops First Nation account for what became of $12.1 million in funding for “exhumation of remains” at an Indian Residential School, according to records disclosed yesterday. The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation made no attempt to exhume any graves despite funding: “Officials were asked about what appears to be missing reports.”
**Access to Information #cdnfoi #ATI@GCIndigenous waived requirement that Kamloops First Nation @Tkemlups explain how it spent $12.1 million in federal funding for “exhumation of remains” at Residential School.
— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) July 24, 2026
There was no attempt to exhume graves. https://t.co/xo881bu3ny… pic.twitter.com/HW5iXRBaUh
Last September, many Canadians were shocked to learn through a Haida Nation news release that British Columbia and Canada had gone behind closed doors in judges’ chambers and signed an agreement that recognized Aboriginal title over all of Haida Gwaii. Without having to prove their title in court, the Haida gained constitutionally protected rights over the entire archipelago.
Now, due to access to information requests from the Public Land Use Society (PLUS), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting public access to Crown land in B.C., we’re feeling the same sense of disbelief to learn that B.C. and the Carney government are poised to give up title to as much as 11 per cent of northwestern B.C. to the tiny Tahltan Nation, population 4,000.
While we all want reconciliation and progress, British Columbia and Ottawa need to stop this risky practice of recognizing Aboriginal title claims that have not been proven in court. If these governments believe that an Aboriginal title claim is strong, they should go before the courts to prove it, rather than simply signing away land that may belong to all of us.
The details of the final agreement with the Tahltan, if there is one, are not public. What is known thanks to PLUS is that, back when the world was distracted by COVID-19 on March 30, 2020, the B.C. NDP signed a Shared Prosperity Agreement that says, “the Province recognizes that Tahltan’s Title and Rights exist in Tahltan Territory.” The agreement defines the Tahltan Territory with a map that includes the entire South-Korea-sized chunk of the province’s northwest. At a news conference last month, B.C. Premier David Eby refused to say whether the province recognized title over the entire territory, but he did say that he had asked Prime Minister Carney for financial support, “because of the very strong title claim that the Tahltan has….”
The reality is that we don’t know the strength of the Tahltan’s claim to Aboriginal title or the extent of that title until it has been tested in court. This is especially concerning considering there are upwards of $1.2 trillion dollars of minerals in B.C.’s “golden triangle,” which is roughly coterminous with the Tahltan’s claimed territory. If they truly possess title, then they, arguably, possess a veto over developments and the right to keep the minerals. Perhaps the Tahltan do have Aboriginal title to all or some of that territory, but is it too much to ask for them to prove it?
It is unclear what would happen if the claim went to court. Aboriginal title is a new and slippery concept defined almost entirely by several rather thick paragraphs in a handful Supreme Court of Canada decisions. The basic idea is sound: Aboriginal people possessed title to at least some lands, and they continue to possess that unless and until it was ceded and/or legally extinguished.
But we still don’t know exactly what it means. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Supreme Court recognized that Aboriginal title is protected by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and not until the 2014 decision in Tsilhqot’in that Aboriginal title was actually proved in a specific place. To prove title, the Tsilhqot’in decision says a First Nation would likely need to show that, pre-sovereignty, it sufficiently used the area in a way that evinced an intention to hold the land; that there was continuity between present and pre-sovereignty occupation; and the occupation was exclusive, in the sense of intention and capacity to control the land by keeping others out. Based on this, one might have thought title could not be proved outside of small, remote areas
Then came Cowichan Tribes. Without any notice, homeowners and commercial property owners in Richmond, B.C., woke up last summer to the news that the B.C. Supreme Court had declared that the Cowichan have Aboriginal title over land where they also hold fee simple. There’s little doubt that the Cowichan were wronged by colonial figures, but the ruling has unsettled private property in an unprecedented way. Most notably, Justice Young ruled that, where fee simple and Aboriginal title clash, Aboriginal title is the senior interest (see paras 2189 and 3588). In other words, even if the Cowichan are not looking to take anyone’s house or farm (and they have repeatedly said so), it’s far from clear they can’t change their minds. The decision is being appealed.
The same concern exists on Haida Gwaii. The “Big Tide (Low Water)” agreement between B.C., Canada and the Haida says the Haida “will honour” fee simple title. But what if the Haida opt to end that agreement? They would be left with a senior, constitutionally protected right vis-a-vis the homeowners and business owners. That is, it’s far from clear that the Haida can’t boot them.
As Indigenous affairs expert and Macdonald-Laurier Institute fellow Karen Restoule recently explained, B.C.’s land governance problems are of its own making, since the province refused to sign treaties when they were available, and then let the land claims fester unresolved for more than a century. Yet making Aboriginal title declarations that cannot be reversed without first having those claims tested in court is not the solution. We simply don’t know where this leads.
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