Dead Wrong is Dead Right About Residential Schools
A review of Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential Schools Story So Wrong, edited by C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan (True North and Dorchester Books, 2025).
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Canada’s Supreme Court, politicians, academics, legacy media journalists and Aboriginal leaders are promoting falsehoods about Indian residential schools that are dividing Canadians, injecting poison into the civic entrails of the country, and fomenting Aboriginal race talk and racial exceptionalism. All this has manifested itself in the anti-intellectual, illiberal, vulgar, dishonest and dehumanizing disrespect and defamation of Canadians who publicly dissent from these falsehoods. This is the depressing conclusion that besets readers of Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong, edited by C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan. This book is a sequel to Grave Error, which was recentlyfavorably mentioned by David Frum in the influential American publication, The Atlantic.
Dead Wrong, like Grave Error, thoroughly disproves such false, insulting and historically ignorant claims about Canadian residential schools as “forced to attend,” “murdered children,” “cultural genocide”, and cruel Dickensian conditions.
As to the latter, one chapter by Dr. Ian Gentles and Pim Wiebel and another by Greg Piasetski convincingly show that nutrition, health conditions and conditions generally at residential schools were consistently better than those on students’ home reserves, so much so that many chiefs and parents opposed the government when in the 1940’s it embarked on a program of phasing them out. As a result of this Aboriginal pressure to keep the schools open, the last one only closed in 1986.
Dead Wrong’s reliable documentary evidence is so convincing that readers must conclude that the perpetuation of these falsehoods is part of a cynical, deliberate campaign to, amongst other things, extract undeserved sympathy and money from other Canadians.
Dead Wrong exposes a full-scale revolt by our elites against the primacy of truth and decency in public discourse on the subjects of residential schools and on the situation of Aboriginals in modern Canada generally.
For example, in scenes reminiscent of Nazis pushing and taunting Jews on the streets of Vienna, Professor Frances Widdowson was assaulted and berated by Aboriginals as a residential school “denialist,” while university officials passively looked on. Her so-called “hate speech” offence was simply writing in a chapter in Dead Wrong and saying out loud in a public square the truth that there is no proof of children being murdered at the Kamloops residential school. In fact, Dead Wrong shows that there is no forensic evidence that children were murdered at any Canadian residential school.
Professor Emeritus Rod Clifton, as a student intern in 1966, lived in the Old Sun Blackfoot Reserve residential school, where he met and married his Aboriginal wife Elaine, (they are still happily married to this day), the first events in his decades-long association with residential schools. This gentleman scholar’s chapter describing his and Elaine’s personal residential school observations, experiences and reflections provides a frank, nuanced, very human, contextual, balanced and generally positive view of them.
Yet, as he notes in his chapter, he and all the similarly highly educated, compassionate, intensely human and accomplished contributors to Dead Wrong, in a merely conclusory manner, with no supporting cogent facts, are brutally smeared as “denialists” akin to Holocaust deniers by such as the taxpayer-funded National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation , purveying only “ugliness’ and “foul comments” about residential schools, just as they are brutally smeared by such as the taxpayer-funded Assembly of First Nations, which would characterize and criminalize Dead Wrong as “hate speech”.
The quality of discussion of residential schools on the part of those who mindlessly characterize them as “genocidal” and who harshly criticize anyone who begs to differ, is intellectually and academically worthless and disgraceful, and personally disrespectful towards and disdainful of the human feelings of those who beg to differ.
In their discourse these unaccomplished, taxpayer-funded critics of those who beg to respectfully differ is so intellectually shallow, mediocre, recklessly mean-spirited and self-interested, that Shakespeare’s image of low and petty persons walking and peeping about under the huge legs of the moral and intellectual Colossi they purport to criticize and fantasize superiority over – low, petty and mean critics not fit to shine the shoes of these Colossi- comes immediately to mind.
They reflect the personal cruelty and lack of substance and lack of class of Donald Trump, and reflect, as the moral nihilist Trump does, the increasing public shallowness, coarseness and gracelessness of our age.
When it was learned that the wife of the mayor of Quesnel, B.C., had read Grave Error and recommended it to other people, as recounted by Professor Tom Flanagan in a chapter on the incident, two local First Nations bands demanded that the book be condemned as hate speech. When Professor Widdowson, who was there, tried to defend the book and inform the municipal Council of the free speech implications of what the bands were demanding, she was shouted down and forcefully told “You don’t belong here.” The intimidated Council bent to the bands’ bullying, illiberal demand and condemned the book without anyone having read it.
The CBC reported on the story.
On its weekly radio show, Unreserved, it repeatedly broadcasts residential school falsehoods, including the blood-libelous “cultural genocide” falsehood that Canada’s Parliament infamously endorsed.
Despite being expressly aware of the truths in Grave Error, the CBC has never apologized for its false assertion in 2021 that there were 215 children murdered and secretly buried at the Kamloops residential school.
One result of the hysteria created by the CBC and the rest of the legacy media as a result of the Kamloops falsehoods was the burning and vandalizing of over 110 churches situated on or near reserves. In the disturbing chapter The Burning: Canada’s Churches Ablaze, Cosmin Dszurdzsa , reminding us all of the ancient truth that nobody has a greater moral obligation to obey the law than those who make the law, chronicles Canadian law enforcement’s marked lack of interest in investigating and prosecuting these crimes, and similar political indifference highlighted by Justin Trudeau’s shameful lawlessness-endorsing statement that such crimes were “understandable”.
For nearly three years the CBC failed to acknowledge a link between these crimes and the Kamloops falsehoods.
In Quesnel, it chose not to interview one of the event’s main protagonists, Professor Widdowson. thusly showing further indifference towards- no, willful disregard of – its mandates to be truthful and “to contribute to informed debate on issues that matter to Canadians by reflecting a diversity of opinion”.
Dead Wrong shows how the CBC’s biased and untruthful reporting on residential schools is typical of such reporting by the legacy media in general, and particularly that of the Globe & Mail, which was largely responsible, along with its “blood and soil”, low and peeping about, propagandist columnist Tanya Talaga, for first publishing the Kamloops falsehoods.
Long after Grave Error exposed these falsehoods, now exposed further by Dead Wrong, neither the Globe nor Ms. Talaga has apologized for or explained their journalistically reckless and country-harming conduct. Still today, starting off the 2026 New Year with more of the same lies, defiant of Dead Wrong’s truths and defiant of journalist ethics, the Globe continues to publish falsehoods about Kamloops and residential schools generally.
Prime Minister Carney and Professor Wanda Wuttunee, representing our political classes and academia, both recently denied and thus dishonored their own fathers who had supported the need for and benefits of residential schools, the politician and the professor thus preferring unrighteous, short-term, personal expediency over truth and loyalty to family and country.
What a terrible example for the country to set!
The recent Aboriginal campaign to force the changing of the name of Powell River, B.C., the subject of a chapter by Frances Widdowson, heard one Aboriginal leader repeatedly referring to white Canadians as “subhuman”, a Nazi trope that seeded the ground for the Holocaust.
The real shock coming from this – the real story- is that nobody – no one in authority– called out this ignorant, vile race-talk.
It has become publicly acceptable by our elites as ok for Aboriginals to engage in race talk and to promote Aboriginal racial exceptionalism.
Dead Wrong , whose critics routinely engage in this ignorant, vile race-talk, is filled with similar examples of our elites’ coarse incivility and animus towards respectful dissenters, their angry intolerant illiberalism, or the passive enabling of it, their loss of respect and support for truth and open debate, their departure from professional standards and ethics, and their disloyalty to the memory and accomplishments of our honorable ancestors.
When elites engage in or enable this kind of civically amoral conduct and tolerate the kind of falsehoods and insults that Dead Wrong exposes and is subject to, they demoralize the citizenry and weaken the trust and social harmony on which the continued success of Canada depends. They fail in their duty to unite Canadians. Instead, they divide us, and, as the Bible says, a country divided against itself cannot stand.
It’s a tragedy that our elites are failing in their duty to widen the parameters of debate on Aboriginal issues- of encouraging other respectful, informed viewpoints, such as those in Dead Wrong, They would do well to heed the words of the political scientist Harry Clor:
“There are truths to be discovered, but they are complex and many-sided; the best way to get to them is by engaging contrary ideas in a manner approximating dialogue.”
Would that our elites had the confidence and inspiring open-mindedness to live the precept of the French philosopher Montaigne, who wrote:
“When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move towards the man who contradicts me; he is instructing me. The cause of truth ought to be common to both of us.”
Or to live the similar precept of Emerson:
“The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.” iii
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elites, for their own selfish purposes, contrary to the cause of truth, and contrary to one of the most fundamental values of democracy – free and open civil and respectful debate on important public issues – have in effect declared a ban on free speech around residential schools and on the situation generally of Aboriginal Canadians in modern-day Canada.
In narrow, insecure and provincial fashion they reject the openness of Clor, Montaigne and Emerson.
Rather, they have erected “no trespassing” signs and barriers around such needed speech and defended those signs and barriers with coarse, fact-free, ad hominem attacks against respectful and informed dissenters, thus preventing discussion of possibly better ways of improving the dysfunctional, segregationist situation of Aboriginals in Canada today.
Presently, and to the infinite harm of Aboriginals, only those who “dare to be a Daniel” iv go past those signs and barriers.
The contributors to Dead Wrong are a few of those courageous Daniels -unjustly dishonored prophets in their own land- that all Canadians, especially Aboriginal Canadians, are in desperate need of.
Dead Wrong is a patriotic, caring, truth-telling book by true gentlemen and gentlewomen scholars. Canada’s failing, graceless elites need to read it, learn some humility and class from it, and act upon it accordingly.
Peter Best
Sudbury. February 2, 2025
i From Peter Wehner, In Defence of Politics, Now More than Ever – The New York Times, October 29, 2016 ii Ibid. iii From his essay, The Conduct of Life iv An old Sunday school hymn, the refrain being: Dare to be a Daniel! Dare to stand alone! Dare to have a purpose firm! Dare to make it known!