Has Kimberly Murray eroded confidence in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
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By Nina Green
Kimberly Murray was Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2010-2015.
Prior to Murray’s appointment, the TRC had been infected by the conspiracy theories of Kevin Annett.
Kevin Annett’s influence on the TRC
As explained here, in 2007 Liberal MP Gary Merasty — influenced by both Annett’s fake documentary Unrepentant, and by media reports concerning ‘Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children’, one of Annett’s many fake organizations and tribunals — wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice demanding that he investigate alleged ‘disappeared’ Indian residential school students.
Prentice took the bait, and stated in the House of Commons on 24 April 2007 that:
I spoke to the media about this subject on Friday. I will say now what I said then. I have three daughters myself. The thought of losing any of them is unimaginable. The thought that they would go away to a school and never return is something I cannot even contemplate.
We will get to the bottom of the disappeared children. The truth and reconciliation commission will hear much about that. I have instructed our officials to look into that and to work with oblate records of the churches to get to the bottom of this issue, and this sad chapter in our history.
Prentice then formed a Working Group under Bob Watts, interim Executive Director of the TRC. The federal government has never revealed the names of the members of Watts’ secret Working Group, but should do so. That the federal government has kept secret since 2007 the names of individuals who have had such a profound impact on Canada is inexcusable.
The Working Group’s report went to the TRC in 2007-8 with this heading:
This paper was prepared by a Working Group of multi-party representatives under the direction of the Interim Executive Director of the TRC. Its primary objective was to explore options and make recommendations to the TRC Commissioner on undertaking research into the issue of Missing Children and Unmarked Burials.
The members of the Working Group produced not a scintilla of evidence that there actually were any missing children or nefarious unmarked burials, and were well aware that authority to conduct a spurious search and criminal investigation into missing children and unmarked burials was outside the TRC’s mandate. Nonetheless, the Working Group recklessly recommended that the TRC carry out that work under the guise of documenting Indian residential school deaths (see attached report), claiming that it was necessary on the basis of ‘recent media reports‘ generated by conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett:
One significant aspect of [the history and legacy of Indian residential schools is] an examination of student deaths in, and disappearances from, the residential schools. Recent media reports describing the extent of the issue and the ongoing suffering it causes survivors and their families demonstrates the need for a thorough examination of what has come to be called the “Missing Children” issue. Research into Missing Children will work within the TRC’s broader research plans and objectives . . . .
In 2009, the TRC requested $1.5 million to search for alleged missing children and nefarious burials. The federal government refused the funding, but the TRC forged ahead anyway.
By her own admission, it was Kimberly Murray who led that effort. At the sham Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) hearing on 25 May 2026, Kimberly Murray revealed that, as the TRC’s Executive Director, she was the driving force behind the change of direction in which the TRC shifted its focus from its mandate of truth and reconciliation to the tireless pursuit and promulgation of a false claim of thousands of missing and ‘disappeared’ children and nefarious burials.
In her testimony on 25 May 2026 Murray revealed to the Tribunal that as Executive Director of the TRC she had enlisted the Chief Coroner of Ontario in her quest, and later coroners across Canada, and that subsequently she requested death records from the provinces. In other words, with the help of provincial coroners and provincial registrars of vital statistics who were not required to produce records under the terms of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, Murray led the TRC on a country-wide fishing expedition which bordered on a criminal investigation, and in the end produced nothing because there was nothing to find.
Murray’s fishing expedition culminated in the TRC’s Missing Children and Unmarked Burials volume in 2015, for which she claimed credit in an affidavit in the Mohawk Mothers lawsuit in 2022, and which, like the Working Group’s 2007-8 report, failed to produce the name of a single missing Indian residential school student, or a single nefarious burial.
Murray as Executive Oversight Lead at the Survivors Secretariat at the Mohawk Institute
After promulgating increasingly lurid and bizarre allegations about Canada’s Indian residential schools in his fake 2006 documentary and in countless books, videos, and websites, Kevin Annett achieved further notoriety in 2011 as a result of his bungled search for unmarked burials at the Mohawk Institute on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario, for which the Mohawk eventually publicly disowned him. It is noteworthy that in 2011, while Annett was involved in his fruitless GPR search and dig at the Mohawk Institute, Kimberly Murray, as Executive Director of the TRC, was simultaneously pursuing an equally fruitless search at the TRC for ‘disappeared’ children and nefarious burials.
Not surprisingly, after the TRC wrapped up in 2015, Murray followed in Annett’s footsteps at the Mohawk Institute. As a direct result of the Kamloops Band’s false claim to have discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’, the Mohawk offered Murray the position of Executive Oversight Lead in the establishment of the Survivors Secretariat. During Murray’s tenure, the search for burials at the Mohawk Institute was approached as a criminal investigation, as reported at the Secretariat’s Annual General Meeting in 2021-22 and in other sources.
Murray’s tenure as Special Interlocutor
While at the Secretariat, Murray was tapped by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to assume the federal civil service position of Special Interlocutor for a term of two years, later extended for an additional six months. Murray was given a budget of $10.4 million dollars to carry out the task assigned to her, a task which she interpreted as necessitating the holding of large-scale expensive National Gatherings across the country which failed to reveal the name of a single missing Indian residential school student or a single nefarious burial.
During her tenure, Murray produced numerous voluminous reports which likewise failed to reveal the name of a single missing Indian residential school student or a single nefarious burial.
Her final report was delivered to the Minister of Justice at yet another expensive National Gathering in October 2024. The key takeaway, repeatedly emphasized throughout her report, is that Canada is guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, and massive human rights violations. Since the report offered no evidence of any of these heinous crimes, Murray circumvented that inconvenient fact by falsely asserting in her final report that genocide, crimes against humanity, and massive human rights violations had all been proven years earlier by the TRC (see Executive Summary, p. 9):
The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) provides indisputable historical evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass human rights violations in the Indian Residential School System.2
Murray’s final report concluded with 42 sweeping ‘Obligations’ (see p. 209), including the obligation that Canada must refer itself to the International Criminal Court:
Canada must refer the enforced disappearance of children, as a crime against humanity, to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Where other individuals or organizations request that the ICC investigate, Canada must not oppose or interfere with such requests.
To put this obligation into context, it should again be recalled that for the past 16 years, despite millions of dollars of Canadian taxpayer money put at her disposal, Kimberly Murray has not been able to produce the name of a single missing Indian residential school child, or a single nefarious burial.
As an insurance policy against Canada’s non-compliance with the obligation she had imposed on it, Murray sent a referral to the ICC herself. On 12 November 2024, she told the CBC that she had sent a copy of her final report to the ICC for its consideration. To her chagrin, the ICC ignored her.
Referral to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
Frustrated by inaction on the part of Canada and the ICC, Kimberly Murray announced to the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 27 November 2024 that she had a Plan B: the Permanent Peoples Tribunal would hold a tribunal in Canada in 2026 (see attachment):
The International Criminal Court investigates crimes against humanity and prosecutes individuals. We know that some of the individuals responsible for the atrocities are still alive in this country and outside this country. We know that to refer a matter to the International Criminal Court, the state has to refer the matter or another state has to refer the matter, so I have called on Canada to refer itself to the International Criminal Court. It would be very meaningful to survivors and communities to have a finding from the International Criminal Court that crimes against humanity happened in this country, because they know they did, but they would like to have that acknowledgment from the United Nations and from the International Criminal Court. I have also in that obligation said to stay out of the way if someone else is trying to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court.
There is another international body that is coming to Canada that I write about in “Expanding the Circle.” It’s the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. Amnesty International and the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal wrote to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal and asked them to come and hold hearings here in Canada on the issue of the missing and disappeared children, and it was accepted. The hearings are going to happen. There is an indictment being prepared that will be served on government and church officials, and international human rights legal experts will be the judges. They haven’t been selected yet. There will be hearings here in the country. I believe it’s in 2026, if my memory serves me correctly. That is a civil society tribunal that has held hearings around the world on different human rights breaches.
Murray told the Senate Committee that a charity known as the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal was bringing the Permanent People’s Tribunal to Canada. However it is clear that this is a red herring since Murray and the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal are not at arms-length. A federal government website records that the Native Women’s Shelter received an almost $1 million dollar grant on 28 April 2023 to facilitate Kimberly Murray’s National Gathering on Unmarked Burials in Montreal. For a women’s shelter charity to receive a $1 million dollar grant to assist a federal civil servant appointed by the Prime Minister to hold an event seems unprecedented. Murray had a $10.4 million dollar budget. Why would she need funds from a women’s shelter operating as a charity to hold an event?
The close relationship established by this federal government grant indicates that it is not the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal which has brought the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal to Canada, prepared the indictment, and organized the witnesses, the panel of judges, and the so-called ‘evidence’. It is Kimberly Murray.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
What, then, is this Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal which Kimberly Murray has brought to Canada?
As mentioned above, Kevin Annett has been notorious for decades for his fake tribunals, beginning with his IHRAAM tribunal in Vancouver in 1998 which accused Canada of genocide (see attachment).
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is Kevin Annett 2.0. Like Annett’s fake tribunals, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has no legal jurisdiction, and operates largely under the control of a single individual, its Secretary General, Gianni Tognoni, who has been with the PPT since its inception in 1979. Tognoni makes virtually all decisions about the PPT’s hearings in conjunction with the requesting entity, in this case Kimberly Murray operating under the aegis of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. The PPT does not follow international law, Canadian law, or any law, has no rules for the admission of evidence, and for the most part appoints ‘judges’ who are not judges in their own countries.
Kimberly Murray’s indictment against Canada (see attachment), read out to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on 25 May 2026 by prosecutor Christa Big Canoe, accuses Canada of genocide and crimes against humanity, the latter including a list of the most heinous crimes and atrocities imaginable:
a. murder.
b. extermination;
c. enslavement;
d. deportation or forcible transfer of population;
e. imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
f. torture;
g. rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
h. persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity grounded on discriminatory reasons that do not fall under any of the five actions constituting the genocide; and
i. enforced disappearance of persons.
The absurdity of this indictment is self-evident as no actual evidence has ever been provided that any legitimate court would consider. Kimberly Murray has desperately tried for 16 years to find evidence that these crimes occurred, but has found none. Undeterred, she is now hoping the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal will compliantly accede to her wishes, and convict Canada of genocide, crimes against humanity, and massive human rights violations.
To return to the original question: Has Kimberly Murray eroded confidence in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Of course she has. She has exposed the fact that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became, under her tenure as Executive Director, something it was never intended to be. The objectives of the TRC’s mandate were (1) truth and (2) reconciliation. Kimberly Murray turned both truth and reconciliation into their opposites. Instead of truth, Canada got false claims of thousands of missing Indian residential school children and nefarious unmarked burials, and ultimately, allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and massive human rights violations. Instead of reconciliation, Canada got increasingly strained relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians fuelled by these false allegations.
As its former Executive Director, Murray has now further discredited the TRC by bringing an absurd indictment against Canada before an entity with no legal jurisdiction, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.
One can thus look backward at the way in which Kimberly Murray has eroded Canada’s confidence in the TRC, but there is a much more significant and immediate problem going forward. Will the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal fall for Kimberly Murray’s ploy? Will Kimberly Murray succeed in having Canada convicted in the worldwide court of public opinion of genocide, crimes against humanity, and massive human rights violations where Kevin Annett failed? Will the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal meekly accede to Murray’s demands that they find Canada guilty of heinous crimes for which there is no evidence?
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Was the Globe and Mail complicit in the false claim by the Kamloops Band that it had found 'the remains of 215 children'?
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Canadians should give some thought to the fact that the TRC executive director and commissioners all believed a preposterous conspiracy theory that tens of thousands of indigenous children had been “disappeared” and every prime minister and the millions of Canadians who worked at or knew about the schools kept this gigantic crime a secret for a hundred years
The FIRST question that must be asked at this tribunal is "Please provide us, with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, evidence of deceased children, including their names and that of their relatives!" This question must be repeated throughout this tribunal if it means being continuously reframed, "Where is the evidence of deceased and missing children, including their names and relatives?" Or "We cannot proceed without documented evidence, including names of ALL the deceased and documentation of every known abuse!" The next question must be, "Millions of taxpayers money has gone into these reports and other public tribunals, yet within ALL of your reports there is NO actual physical evidence proving these allegations, without it they're just stories, provide the names, dates, death certificates, registers etc., for without it there is no case." As for this article, excellent work Ms. Green, you've provided your evidence, disregard any negative comments on how you've presented it, you did the work that didn't.