Canadian Attorney General wants to make 'residential school denialism' illegal despite mass graves hoax

British Columbia’s attorney general says the provincial NDP government is urging Ottawa to change the Criminal Code to criminalize what it calls “residential school denialism.” Niki Sharma made the comments Thursday during an event in Surrey where the province demanded the designation of a site for ash scattering. She was asked about a recent Assembly of First Nations resolution calling on the federal government to treat residential school denialism as hate speech.

“We’ve also been calling on the federal government to take action through the criminal code,” Sharma said. She added: “We have seen an unprecedented and terrible rise in residential school denialism here in the legislature and in Victoria. We as a government have solidly condemned it.”

The comments come after British Columbia controversy over statements made by independent MLA Dallas Brodie and other former Conservative MLAs regarding the Kamloops Indian Residential School site and the 2021 ground-penetrating radar findings.

Brodie has publicly said the number of confirmed child burials at the former school site is zero and questioned aspects of media coverage surrounding the findings. Indigenous organizations and government officials have described similar claims as residential school denialism.

The AFN passed an emergency resolution this week calling on Canada to create stand-alone legislation making residential school denialism a criminal offence under hate speech laws. BC Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee said there has been an “exponential” increase in anti-Indigenous hate across British Columbia and Canada according to The Western Standard.

Previous attempts to introduce similar measures at the federal level include private members’ bills from NDP MP Leah Gazan. Those proposals sought to amend the Criminal Code to make publicly denying, downplaying, condoning, or justifying the residential school system a form of willful promotion of hatred against Indigenous peoples.

A proposed amendment to the federal Combatting Hate Act that would have criminalized residential school denialism was defeated in the Senate in June.

Senator Patti LaBoucane-Benson, who opposed the amendment, said it risked “watering our wine and not going for the full force of what should happen with residential school denialism.”

The BC government has not introduced its own provincial legislation on the issue. Canada spent about $8 million previously to try to discover the "heartbreaking truth" about mass graves, or unmarked graves at the Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, only to find that there were no bodies recovered at all. The publicly confirmed number from these investigations is 0 recovered bodies as of 2026. Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations Carolane Gratton said that the substantial funding was used for fieldwork, records searches, and securing the grounds of the school, Western Standard reports, but no remains were ever uncovered.

In 2021 the First Nations in BC announced that they had discovered the graves of 215 children on the grounds of the school. International criticism of Canada and their residential school system was swift and furious. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even went out to the site with a teddy bear to express his compassion. "What happened decades ago isn’t part of our history, it is an irrefutable part of our present," Trudeau said.