Is the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal a kangaroo court?
Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
By Nina Green
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) officially describes itself on its website as an opinion tribunal:
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) is an international opinion tribunal competent to rule on any serious crime committed to the detriment of peoples and minorities.
Despite this explicit admission that it is merely an opinion tribunal with no legal jurisdiction, the PPT pretentiously and inaccurately claims it is ‘competent to rule on any serious crime’. In reality, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is not competent to rule on any crime, much less crimes of the highest magnitude such as genocide and crimes against humanity which fall under international law.
Given the fact that the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has bestowed a mandate on itself to meddle in the internal affairs of sovereign states while lacking any legal jurisdiction to do so, in order to maintain even the slightest semblance of integrity and impartiality, the PPT must confine the ‘evidence’ it allows its ‘judges’ to hear to the stated purpose of the inquiry. In the case of the PPT hearing in Montreal on 25-29 May 2026, the PPT did not even pretend to do that.
According to the PPT website (see attached screenshot), the stated purpose of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal hearings in Montreal on 25-29 May 2026 was specifically limited to an inquiry into ‘Missing and disappeared Indigenous children and [nefarious] unmarked graves in Canada’. This limited mandate was subsequently reiterated by the Tribunal judges themselves in a statement posted on the PPT website after the hearings:
Our mandate was to look at missing and disappeared Indigenous children and unmarked graves, and the forced and coerced sterilisation of Indigenous women, through the lens of international law. [bolding added]
In fact, no evidence at all was introduced at the Tribunal hearings in Montreal on 26 May 2026 about missing and disappeared Indigenous children and [nefarious] unmarked graves in Canada.
The Montreal hearing was thus a kangaroo court in which neither the ‘evidence’ produced to the ‘judges’ nor the preliminary ‘decision’ rendered by the ‘judges’ on 29 May 2026 had anything at all to do with the stated purpose of the inquiry. In a stunning display of sleight of hand, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal told the world — and continues to tell the world — that it was and is inquiring into missing and disappeared children and [nefarious] unmarked graves in Canada, while conducting a sham trial with four days of ‘evidence’ which had absolutely nothing to do with missing and disappeared children and [nefarious] unmarked graves in Canada.
Journalist Connie Walker’s ‘evidence’ to the PPT Tribunal exemplifies the PPT’s sleight of hand
Former CBC journalist Connie Walker’s ‘testimony’ to the Tribunal on 26 May 2026 is a particularly egregious example of the deliberately duplicitous nature of the PPT hearings. The moderator began the 26 May 2026 session with this statement:
Welcome, everyone. Again, I’m Kahtehrón:ni Iris Stacey. I’ll be moderating for today’s, for our second day of the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Missing Indigenous Children and Unmarked Graves.
So today we’re going to begin day two of the Tribunal. Today we’re going to hear from two expert panels. The morning will be on the investigative journalism on unmarked graves.
After this very specific statement by moderator Iris Stacey that the ‘expert investigative journalists’ would provide the ‘judges’ with evidence of unmarked graves, former CBC journalist Connie Walker did not so much as mention unmarked graves (or missing and disappeared children) in her lengthy ‘testimony’.
Instead, Walker’s unsworn ‘testimony’ to the Tribunal was a rehash of her misleading 2022 8-part podcast, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s. Why misleading? Because Walker identified the wrong Indian residential school — St Michael’s.
The focus of Walker’s podcast, Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s, is a hearsay story about her deceased father, Howard Cameron (1955-2013) which came to her attention via a Facebook posting on 30 May 2021 by her half brother, Hal Cameron, with whom she was not close (see attachment). Hal posted the story three days after the Kamloops Indian Band’s false claim that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’ at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (see attached media release by Chief Rosanne Casimir dated 27 May 2021).
Hal’s 30 May 2021 Facebook posting reads as follows:
Hal Cameron
May 30, 2021
I remember my late dad telling me a story of his time as an RCMP member, he once stopped a drunk driver on highway patrol.
Low and behold it was one of the priests that abused him in Residential Schools.
My dad beat the shit out of him. He thought for sure there would be a call to his commanding officer, and that would be the end of his career.
No call made, nothing.
That fucker knew what he had done, and karma came to collect.
That has always been one of my favourite stories, because fuck them.
Connie Walker’s immediate public reaction to Hal’s post?
Connie Walker
Fuck them!
Walker’s reaction is not the reaction of an objective journalist, and she admits she was influenced by the Kamloops Band’s false claim that it had found ‘the remains of 215 children’. She says that after she read Hal’s Facebook post, she ‘couldn’t stop thinking about it’. She decided she had to identify the priest so he could be held accountable:
CONNIE WALKER: Yeah. I want to try to find—I mean, I don’t know if I’ll be able to, but I want to try to find out who that priest was. And I want to find out, or try to find out, like, if he was ever—if we could find out who it was, like, if he was ever held accountable for anything that happened.
Walker had almost nothing to go on. Hal’s Facebook post did not say when or where the incident took place, or name the priest or the residential school. The only clue in the Facebook posting was that Howard Cameron’s assault on the priest took place when he was an RCMP officer.
Howard Cameron’s RCMP postings
The dates of Howard Cameron’s RCMP service in the Native Special Constable Program are publicly known. According to Library and Archives Canada records, Howard Cameron (S/1821) joined the RCMP on 19 January 1977, and was discharged on 30 April 1979. He was thus with the RCMP a little over 27 months, which included an initial training period of 16 weeks at RCMP Depot in Regina plus 6 months of field training, which would have occupied most of 1977.
The two family members who would have had first-hand knowledge of Howard Cameron’s RCMP career were his first wife, Denise Gamble, to whom he was still married at the time, (see attached article by Doug Cuthand), and Connie Walker’s mother, Lorraine Walker, who had just turned 17 when she gave birth to Connie on 25 March 1979 in the Balcarres hospital, a few kilometres from the Okanese Indian Reserve where Lorraine was then living with her parents, Margaret Walker (1943-1996) and Harry Bellegarde (d.2003).
Despite the fact that Howard Cameron’s first wife, Denise Gamble, and Connie’s mother, Lorraine Walker, were the two family members who would have known the most about Howard Cameron’s whereabouts during the years 1977-1979, and whether he had ever told them about beating up a priest from a residential school when he was on highway patrol, Walker interviewed neither of them.
Instead, Walker interviewed Howard Cameron’s second wife, Norlaine Sutherland, who had no first-hand knowledge of his RCMP career, and could only say that he had two postings, Balcarres (where Connie was born), and Shellbrook:
NORLAINE CAMERON: See, look: your dad was right here. He was in Balcarres first, I think, eh? And then Shellbrook.
CONNIE WALKER: Okay. Okay.
NORLAINE CAMERON: Yeah.
CONNIE WALKER: What does that cup say? H.J. Cameron.
NORLAINE CAMERON: From ‘78 to ‘79. So, this was when he was in Shellbrook.
CONNIE WALKER: I’m surprised to find out that my dad was only an officer for a brief time. He joined the RCMP in 1977 and left in 1979. So, there’s just a two-year window when he could’ve pulled over the priest. And there are only two places where it could have happened. Norlaine tells me he was first stationed in Balcarres, and before I was born, he transferred to Shellbrook, and was there until he left the force.
Walker thus admits that — if it happened at all — there are only two places Howard Cameron’s assault on the priest could have taken place — at Balcarres, or at Shellbrook.
Walker then moves from that fact to two erroneous assumptions.
Walker’s first erroneous assumption is that a priest Howard Cameron had known in a Saskatchewan Indian residential school in the 1960s was likely to have still been in the area of that school in the late 1970s, and that Howard Cameron could thus logically have been expected to run into the priest while on a routine highway patrol near either Balcarres or Shellbrook. That assumption ignores the fact that in 1969 the federal government took over all Canada’s Indian residential schools from the churches, and that most of the clergy had left the residential schools by 1969. Only a few clergy remained behind for a few years to assist with the transition to lay administrators, often Indigenous lay administrators. It is thus highly improbable that Howard Cameron, while on highway patrol near Balcarres or Shellbrook in 1977-1979, could have run into a priest he had known at residential school.
Walker’s second erroneous assumption is that the residential school was St Michael’s. Walker’s podcast is focused exclusively on St Michael’s Indian Residential School. She interviewed dozens of people with a connection to St Michael’s, and the title of her podcast made the identification explicit: Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s. She drove the point home in the first episode of her podcast, saying she passed St Michael’s on her way to her brother Hal’s house on the Beardy’s Okemasis reserve near Duck Lake, and that she thought the abusive priest was from St Michael’s:
There were at least 20 residential schools in Saskatchewan alone. One of them was the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake. I think that’s where my dad first crossed paths with the priest who abused him. I drove past it on my way to Hal’s house. It was a big red brick building, three or four stories high. It always looked to me like an abandoned hospital. Like something out of a horror movie. [bolding added]
However Walker’s assumption that the school was St Michael’s is belied by the fact that neither of her father’s RCMP postings was anywhere near St Michael’s. Balcarres is 400 kilometres southeast of Duck Lake where St Michael’s was located, and Shellbrook is 100 kilometres northwest of Duck Lake (see attached maps). Why would a priest from St Michael’s be anywhere in the vicinity of either Balcarres or Shellbrook when Howard Cameron was on highway patrol there in 1977-1979? Walker never raises that obvious question in her podcast or in her many subsequent interviews, much less answers it. And as noted above, Walker never interviewed the two people — her father’s first wife, Denise Gamble, or her own mother, Lorraine Walker — who could have given her first-hand information about Howard Cameron’s RCMP career, and in particular whether he had ever told either of them at the time about assaulting a priest from a residential school.
Howard Cameron attended two residential schools, but received most of his education at a day school on his home reserve
Howard Cameron did attend St Michael’s, but as Walker discovered, that was not the only school he attended.
When Walker examined the Oblate records for St Michael’s Indian Residential School at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, she learned that her father, Howard Cameron, only attended St Michael’s from 1961-2, when he was six, and from 1967-1968, when he was 12-13. It is worth mentioning in passing that the 1961-2 school year was the year noted artist Alex Janvier was on staff at St Michael’s as a boys’ teacher. See the attached Oblate codex for St Michael’s, Duck Lake.
The St Michael’s records reveal that Howard Cameron received most of his elementary school education from 1962-1967 at a school other than St Michael’s. By the time she broadcast Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s, Walker obviously knew where that other school was, but instead of identifying it, she merely stated disingenuously on her podcast that ‘other schools had opened up nearby that weren’t residential schools’, and left it at that.
CONNIE WALKER: Howard Cameron. With a number next to it—829. It’s on an enrollment form dated May 5, 1961. He was six years old. It’s heartbreaking to think of him being so small when he was sent to the school. And I can’t help but wonder how long after he arrived did the priest abuse him?
CONNIE WALKER: My dad was at St. Michael’s for the 1961-62 school year, and then he seems to have left. By then, other schools had opened up nearby that weren’t residential schools. I find my dad’s name back on the St. Michael’s attendance records from 1967 to 1968. And then when he was 13, he transferred to Lebret, another residential school run by the Oblates a few hours away. He was there for a year and a half.
CONNIE WALKER: I asked my uncles if they thought the priest could be from Lebret, but they said they were treated much better there. And one of my uncles said that my dad told him the priest he pulled over was from St. Michael’s.
Walker thus deliberately left her podcast listeners in the dark about the school her father attended from 1962-1967. However Schedule K of the Federal Day Schools Settlement (see attachment) reveals what Walker chose not to reveal. There was a day school on Howard Cameron’s home reserve of Beardy’s Okemasis at Duck Lake called Beardy’s Day School which operated from 1957 to 1984, which means that when he turned six in 1961, there was a day school Howard Cameron could have attended from the outset, and that he almost certainly did attend from 1962-1967.
The existence of Beardy’s Day School from 1957-1984 on Howard Cameron’s home reserve raises two obvious questions.
(1) Firstly, the existence of Beardy’s Day School from 1957-1984 raises the obvious question of why Howard Cameron was accepted at St Michael’s Indian Residential School in 1961 when he should have been attending the day school on his reserve. Department of Indian Affairs policy at the time was that status Indian children who could attend a day school on the reserve were not admitted to Indian residential schools. Placements at Indian residential schools were reserved for children for whom day school was not an option because (1) there was no day school on the reserve; (2) they were orphans, and there was no one to care for them on the reserve (in the attached Edmonton Journal article the claim is made that there were 200 orphans at St Michael’s); (3) their home situations required that they be removed from the home for their safety; or (4) their families lived a nomadic lifestyle. See the attached excerpts from the 1956 Oblate Indian Residential School Administrative Handbook held by the Provincial Archives of Alberta.
Howard Cameron’s attendance at the Beardy’s Day School from 1962-1967 is corroborated by Walker’s interview of Howard Cameron’s sister, Marguerite (nee Cameron) Gamble (1945-2024). Walker says Marguerite was 10 years older than Howard, and helped raise him, which could only have occurred if Marguerite and Howard were living at home on the Beardy’s Okemasis reserve, and Howard was attending the day school there from 1962-1967.
(2) Secondly, the existence of Beardy’s Day School raises the obvious question of why Howard Cameron was admitted to St Michael’s at the age of six. The minimum age of admission to both residential and day schools under the Indian Act was seven. Children younger than six were only admitted when special circumstances required it. In many cases, the special circumstances were that, with families of 15 children like Howard Cameron’s, status Indian parents could not afford to support their children at home, and lacked the space to house them, and Indian residential schools took them in. Howard Cameron’s mother, Mary (nee Mike) Cameron, was a devout Catholic. It thus seems possible that Howard Cameron was admitted to St Michael’s in 1961 to help Leo and Mary Cameron care for their ever-growing family.
As noted above, Walker learned from the Oblate records at the Provincial Archives of Alberta that her father, Howard Cameron, for unexplained reasons left the day school on his reserve and was readmitted to St Michael’s for the 1967-1968 school year, after which he was transferred to the Lebret Indian Residential School (also known as Qu’Appelle) for a year and a half. Although Walker never focuses on her father’s time at Lebret, the fact that he attended residential school there during the years 1968-9 is highly significant because Lebret is only a 12-minute drive from Balcarres, where Howard Cameron was later posted as an RCMP Special Constable in May 1978, and where Connie Walker was born in March 1979 (see attached map). See also attachment from the Winter 1978 issue of the RCMP Quarterly.
The lack of transparency in Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s, is thus shocking. Apart from one brief easy-to-miss passage in which she mentions ‘other schools that weren’t residential schools’ and Lebret Indian Residential School, Walker leaves her listeners with the impression that Howard Cameron attended St Michael’s for years, and that the priest he assaulted could thus only have been from St Michael’s. In fact, the records Walker found at the Provincial Archives of Alberta establish that Howard Cameron was only at St Michael’s for two years at widely-separated intervals, and that the rest of the time he was being raised by his older sister Marguerite on his home reserve where he was almost certainly attending Beardy’s Day School, and that he then attended Lebret Indian Residential School near Balcarres, where he was later posted as an RCMP officer in 1978, and where Connie Walker was born in 1979.
Walker’s erroneous identification of the priest Howard Cameron assaulted as Father Gilles Gauthier
Walker’s erroneous focus on St Michael’s — which was nowhere near either of her father’s RCMP postings at Balcarres and Shellbrook — thus led Walker to identify the priest her father assaulted while an RCMP officer as Father Gilles Gauthier (1932-2024), who was on staff at St Michael’s from about 1961-1972.
The problem Walker refused to face in making Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s, is that she found no evidence that Father Gilles Gauthier was in Saskatchewan — much less in the specific Balcarres or Shellbrook areas — while her father was an RCMP officer during 1977-1979. The evidence she found placed Father Gauthier in Alberta during those years.
Like a great many of the clergy who staffed the Catholic Indian residential schools over the years, Father Gilles Gauthier was French-speaking (English was his second language), and like many of those same clergy, he was born in Quebec. (It is a highly significant but overlooked fact that a substantial number of the nuns, priests, and brothers at Catholic Indian residential schools were French-speakers from Quebec, France, and Belgium.)
When Walker tracked Father Gauthier down, he was 89, and suffering from Alzheimer’s to the extent that the Oblates were his legal representative. Walker interviewed him anyway, despite a letter from Father Gauthier’s doctor, a decision which raises obvious ethical issues:
CONNIE WALKER: He [Father Ken Thorson] said it would be irresponsible for us to air our interview with Gauthier. Thorson sent me a letter from Father Gauthier’s doctor who said Gauthier has Alzheimer’s, and that any information he gives does not reflect reality.
By the end of her 8-part podcast, Walker had no verifiable evidence connecting Father Gauthier to the priest Howard Cameron assaulted while he was in the RCMP.
What she did have was overwhelming evidence that Father Gauthier was not that priest because he was in Alberta during the years 1977-1979, not in Saskatchewan.
Walker found most of that evidence in an Edmonton Journal article from 5 February 1989 (see attachments). At the time of the 1989 interview, Father Gauthier was a parish priest at Hobbema, the home of former TRC Commissioner Chief Wilton Littlechild, who told a TRC hearing at Saint Albert in 2011 that if it hadn’t been for the Oblates, he would likely have ended up dead on Skid Row. Father Gilles Gauthier was at the same TRC hearing. The remarks of both Father Gauthier and TRC Commissioner Wilton Littlechild at that hearing are worth reading in full (see attached transcript).
The information Walker found in the Edmonton Journal article established that Father Gauthier was NOT in Saskatchewan during the years 1977-1979, and therefore could NOT have been the drunk-driving priest her father, Howard Cameron, allegedly beat up.
Firstly, in the Edmonton Journal article, Father Gauthier stated, in the context of advice he commonly gave to parents at Hobbema, that he himself did not drink:
Gauthier came to Hobbema a little more than a year ago. Here, he ministers with toughness. When a father or mother comes to him and complains that their child is drinking, he tells them: “As far as I know, you drink also. So don’t tell your young boy, 17 years old, not to drink if you drink yourself. Start that first and then come and see me if you still have a problem. I don’t drink. That’s why I can tell you to stop drinking.
Secondly, the article established that after he left St Michael’s, Father Gauthier went to Bangladesh in 1973 to work with Mother Teresa where, in 1976, he was nearly killed when he was crushed by a bus. When he regained consciousness in a jungle leprosarium, he was bleeding from his eyes, ears and mouth. His ribs, legs, and an arm were broken, and his shoulders were separated. He caught hepatitis, and his liver and kidneys were damaged. When he was well enough to travel, he returned to Canada to convalesce. His recovery from his injuries took a long time; he saw a doctor once a week for years.
When he was able to return to work, Father Gauthier worked on Edmonton’s Skid Row where in 1978 he co-founded the Native Pastoral Centre to minister to the growing number of native people moving into Edmonton’s inner city. The Native Pastoral Centre later merged with Sacred Heart Parish, which in October 1991 was recognized as Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples, Edmonton’s “First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Parish” (see September 2021 issue of Oblate Spirit). In 1979, Father Gauthier encouraged his parishioners at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in the Edmonton suburb of Winterburn to sponsor a refugee Vietnamese family, which the parishioners did. It is clear from the foregoing and other evidence that Father Gauthier was NOT posted in Saskatchewan during the years 1977-1979 and was therefore most certainly NOT the drunken priest Walker’s father, Howard Cameron, had allegedly beaten up.
As is evident from the foregoing, Walker’s claim that during the years 1977-1979 her father, Howard Cameron, beat up a drunken Father Gilles Gauthier because Gauthier had sexually abused him at St Michael’s completely fell apart during her ‘investigation’, but she refused to acknowledge that fact. Instead she spread her false story about Father Gilles Gauthier far and wide in 2022 in her Spotify podcast, and has continued to spread it in countless interviews since that time. Her podcast ran on the CBC’s The Current in 2024, and most recently, it formed almost the entirety of her ‘evidence’ at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal hearing in Montreal on 26 May 2026.
Along the way, Walker blackened the name of St Michael’s Indian Residential School and everyone who worked there by quoting extensive completely unsubstantiated allegations by members of the Cameron family and other former students, while ignoring evidence that members of the Cameron family were actually on staff at St Michael’s. See:
Darlene Rose Okemaysim
There are families of former staff still alive ~ most resided in the agency ~ some staffers were former students (Cameron’s, Seeseequasis, Okemaysim’s) ~ we have no documents or pics (house fire New Years 1977) [bolding added]
Is Walker saying that members of her father’s family, the Camerons, and other members of families on the Beardy’s Okemasis reserve who worked at St Michael’s tolerated and abetted the abuse of children depicted in the unsubstantiated allegations she broadcast to the world on her podcast Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s? It seems she is.
To recap. Walker found no evidence to substantiate the claim in her half brother Hal’s Facebook post that Howard Cameron, while he was an RCMP officer between the years 1977 and 1979, beat up a drunken Father Gilles Gauthier who had abused him at St Michael’s Indian Residential School. Howard Cameron’s two postings at Balcarres and Shellbrook were nowhere near St Michael’s, and Father Gilles Gauthier, who devoted his life to serving Canada’s Indigenous peoples, was in Alberta, not Saskatchewan, between the years 1977 and 1979.
We thus return to the initial question: Is the Permanent People’s Tribunal a kangaroo court?
Obviously, it is. Not only did Connie Walker’s evidence at the Tribunal hearing in Montreal on 26 May 2026 have nothing whatever to do with the stated purpose of the hearing, which the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal states was an inquiry into ‘Missing and disappeared Indigenous children and [nefarious] unmarked graves in Canada’, but Walker’s testimony consisted entirely of her flawed investigation which wrongly vilified both Father Gilles Gauthier and St Michael’s Indian Residential School.
Parliament cannot continue to ignore the harm being done to Canada by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. Parliament must take action before the ‘judges’ hand down their final decision on 30 September 2026.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Parliament Must Insist That NCTR Make RCMP Investigation Public
Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada
Or, by contributing to our Donor Box:
I'm long past the complete absence of human remains. There aren't any. Now I'm awaiting the parents of 225 "victims" --- theoretically hundreds of people --- to come forward. It's been a while. Surely the great Liberal leaders know who they are.
Nina White, you are a National Treasure! Thank you so much for the work you do to shed light on the shadowed truth. This tribunal is fully against both truth and reconciliation because while they bend and twist them, they continue to guilt our population and drain our dwindling coffers.