Is the CBC calling Prime Minister Mark Carney's father a residential school denialist?
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By Nina Green
In an 'explainer' entitled 'Residential school denialism: what is it and how to recognize it' published 17 March 2025, the CBC expounded on 'residential school denialism' - a meaningless term invented by Sean Carleton and Daniel Heath Justice in an article published in The Conversation on 5 August 2021.
The CBC article begins with the blindingly obvious statement that:
Residential school denialism does not deny the existence of the school system
And then goes on to say:
but rather downplays, excuses or misrepresents facts about the harms caused by it, experts say.
What does that actually mean?
Apparently it means whatever the CBC and its experts want it to mean.
For example, Crystal Gail Fraser is quoted by the CBC as saying she:
sees denialism when people suggest the residential school system had good intentions . . . .
Sean Carleton echoed that opinion, saying:
denialism is "a strategy to twist, downplay, misrepresent, minimize residential school truths in favour of more controversial opinions that the system was well-intentioned."
Would that include Prime Minister Mark Carney's father, Dr Robert Carney, who was principal in Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories at a school which was included as Breynat Hall in the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement? See below.
Are Crystal Gail Fraser and Sean Carleton suggesting that the Prime Minister's father, a well-respected educator, civil servant, and faculty member at the University of Alberta did not have good intentions when he served in the 1960s as principal of the Fort Smith Federal Day School, later renamed Joseph Burr Tyrrell Elementary?
For his part, Robert Carney clearly thought that he - and the residential school system - had good intentions. In his principal's message in the 1963 issue of the school's yearbook, The Borean (see attachment below), Robert Carney stressed the vital importance of the work the school he was principal of was doing:
We live in a small community, and above all, we live in a small community in Canada's North, whose very future is dependent on the educational processes that are being carried out in its schools. What is being done today in the field of education is the greatest investment of Northern endeavour. So vital is the Educational process, and so important its result, that it goes without saying that every citizen of the Northwest Territories is vitally interested in the work of such a school as ours. We have a great responsibility to the North, and we must not be easily satisfied with what we do.
It is my fervent hope that each year the Borean is published, it will record in its pages new successes and greater results. I am confident that such will be the case.
R.J. Carney, B.A., M.Ed., Principal
While he was in the North, Robert Carney also served as Chief of School Programs for the Northwest Territories (see attachment below).
In 1971 he resigned that position, and joined the faculty of the University of Alberta. In 1976, he was appointed Acting Director of the Department of Indian Affairs for the province of Alberta. See attached news clipping below.
Do Canadians doubt that Robert Carney had good intentions when he served in those positions? Would the CBC and its experts label him a residential school denialist for serving as Chief of School Programs in the Northwest Territories, and as Acting Director for the Department of Indian Affairs in Alberta?
After the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) published its report in 1996, Robert Carney, an educator with considerable experience in the North, wrote a review in which he was highly critical of the Commission's work on residential schools (see attachment below).
According to Carney, the RCAP report offered a simplistic and one-sided perspective that failed to take historical context and comparisons into account:
The problem is that the Aboriginal perspective dominates virtually everything that is said. This is not surprising given that the linear perspective has been defined in such a way to exclude it from the analysis. As a result, Aboriginal residential schools are invariably cast in an unfavourable light. Whenever the schools are mentioned, they are found almost without exception to have failed to provide either acceptable care or education. The schools' objectives, policies and practices are identified as a systematic strategy of cultural repression which was accompanied by an extraordinary amount of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. This is clearly a slanted account of these institutions, and therefore should be viewed cautiously because, to cite one of its problems, it tells only part of the story.
The phenomenon of Aboriginal residential schooling is too complex and requires considerable nuance, as well as conceptual analysis, for simplistic historical interpretations to be serviceable. The Commissioners' discussion of the schools fails to place them in a given historical and social setting. Moreover, as Michael Bernstein and Norman Davies have argued, comparative analyses of past phenomena should be an essential element of any historical exercise. According to Bernstein, competing analysts of an historical event can sometimes reach agreement on the event's basic meaning; while adherents of rival interpretations, who claim theirs is the only perspective that does justice to the event totally reject the possibility of dialogue. The matters discussed in this review are based on the assumption that comparisons are a necessary part of the historian's trade. No historical event, including the era of Aboriginal residential schooling, can be understood without them.
In his critique of the RCAP Report, Dr Carney stated further that, in addition to offering education, residential schools supported Native communities in other ways, including serving as welfare institutions for orphaned, abandoned, and handicapped children, as well as adults:
The work of the traditional boarding schools [i.e. residential schools] is similarly ignored in the chapter's introductory section. The fact is that in addition to providing basic schooling and training related to local resource use, they served Native communities in other ways. It would have been fair to acknowledge that many traditional boarding schools, in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.
Would the CBC and its experts label Dr Robert Carney a residential school denialist for those assertions?
Dr Carney also wrote a scathing review (see attached copy below) of Celia Haig-Brown's 1988 book, Resistance and Renewal. Haig-Brown based her book on interviews of former students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, including Chief Joe Stanley Michel, who taught at the school, and his wife, Anna Soule.
In Carney's view, Resistance and Renewal is deeply flawed for two reasons:
Celia Haig-Brown's attempt to illustrate the themes of resistance and renewal by students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which was managed by Oblate missionaries and the Sisters of St. Ann from the 1890s to the 1960s, fails in two important respects. Her discussion is largely devoid of documentary sources and her approach to and use of oral testimony is such that it trivializes much of what her informants had to say. As a result, her study is little more than a series of disconnected and largely impressionistic statements of moral outrage.
Would the CBC and its experts label Dr Robert Carney a residential school denialist for pointing out the shortcomings in Celia Haig-Brown's methodology?
Perhaps the CBC should stick to reporting the news, rather than attempting to 'educate' Canadians as to what they should believe about a meaningless slogan - residential school denialism - invented and carelessly flung about by people who themselves cannot define it without accusing the Prime Minister's father of it.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Why did the Catholic Church not reveal this till now?
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I saw first hand how CBC reports first nations issues. They only tell part of the story.
Not a fan of Carney, he is a WEF groomed puppet, but CBC is not trustworthy news.
I lived on the Northern Ontario Reserves. I know what goes on up there, and how much corruption happens.
This is another prime example of reporting from Woke Watch Canada that is totally supported by documented evidence and logic. This article puts a spot light on how the CBC is willing to manipulate and misrepresent the truth in order to be Canada’s indigenous propaganda machine wherein the CBC attempts to falsely label people as “residential school deniers” in order to sell a false set of facts as the truth.
In fact I can attest to the fact that the CBC is actually working to cover up the truth as I filed a complaint with the CBC about errors in their broadcast using the CBC’s own broadcast as grounds for my complaint, only to receive no response. I refiled with the CBC ombudsman who informed me that he would get to it but that was well more than a year ago.