Rory Leishman:

On Oct. 29, Kimberly Murray issued her final report as Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. At a press conference to mark the occasion, federal Justice Minister Arif Virani said: “You can’t hear stories about … young girls being impregnated and then (having) their babies being taken away and incinerated, and not have a response.”

Quite so. However, Virani did not respond, as he should have, by telling the truth that no investigators inside or outside his department have come up with solid evidence that any young girl was ever impregnated by a priest in an Indian Residential School, let alone had her baby incinerated.

Yet Murray, in her final report, includes the often repeated, but entirely unverified, story told by Irene Favell to the CBC in an interview on July 8, 2008 about how she had witnessed a murder at the Muscowequan Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in the 1940s. According to Murray, Favel said: “There was a young girl…she was pregnant from a priest there.…she had her baby, and (nuns) took the baby, and wrapped it up in a nice pink outfit, and they took it downstairs … they took the baby in the … furnace room, and they threw that little baby in there and burned it alive. All you could hear was (this little cry, like) ‘Uuh!’ and that was it.”

That is, indeed, a horrific story. But it is utterly incredible. Murray did not mention in her report that Favel claimed in her CBC interview that the impregnated young victim “was seven-years old.” Before broadcasting such a fanciful tale about alleged atrocities perpetrated by a Catholic priest and nuns, the CBC should have probed for answers to at least a few basic questions such as: Who was the priest who impregnated the young student? Who were the nuns who threw the baby into the furnace? How many of Favel’s former classmates can corroborate her appalling accusations of clerical rape and infanticide?

None of these questions has been answered by Murray, the CBC or anyone else. By way of proof, all Murray has to say in her report is: “Many testimonies and oral histories confirm that children witnessed babies being wrapped in blankets and burned in the institutions’ furnace.”

What Murray does not cite is any corroborating evidence for any of these gruesome tales. While there are a few well-documented cases of girls who were sexually abused by a perverted priest at an Indian Residential School, there is no proof that any of these girls was impregnated. Likewise, there is no proof that any nun burned a baby in the furnace of an IRS school or that any child at an IRS school was murdered by a school employee.

In her final report, Murray notes that “genocide is most commonly associated with mass killings of a targeted population over a short period of time” and she concedes that, in this usual sense, Indigenous Canadians have not been subjected to genocide. Instead, she accuses the government of Canada of perpetrating “genocide by attrition,” by continually denying Indigenous Canadians “basic needs as a means to slowly assure their destruction.”

That is poppycock. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Trudeau government is projected to spend $42.7 billion this year alone on Indigenous peoples. That is $2.7 billion more than it plans to spend on national defense and amounts to $23,700 for every Indigenous man, woman, and child in the country. Murray has not — and cannot — cite any evidence that the government of Canada has ever spent less per capita on Indigenous peoples than the per-capita average for all Canadians.

Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, educational reformer Egerton Ryerson and other lay and clerical leaders, Protestant and Catholic, created the Indian Residential Schools so Indigenous youngsters could learn to read, write, speak English or French, and develop other basic skills they would need to escape the perils of a poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short life of an illiterate nomad. Yet Murray has no compunction about smearing all the dedicated employees in the Indian Residential Schools as perpetrators of cultural genocide.

What does Murray now propose to help today’s struggling Indigenous families? More billions and billions of dollars in government handouts.

That will only make matters worse. What so many Indigenous families really need from government are well-funded and well-designed programs to empower them to follow the example of the hundreds of thousands of thriving Indigenous people who have escaped the crime, violence, poverty, and despair that pervade so many welfare-ridden reserves, by moving to a healthy community, on or off a reserve, where such basic needs as decent housing, clean water and productive jobs are readily available.