The Globe and Mail gets it wrong again
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
In an article on 30 May 2026, the Globe and Mail finally admitted — five years after the fact — that its initial reporting on the Kamloops Band’s claim was wrong:
. . . claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools . . . is an extraordinary assertion, one that requires proof. That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.
The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves” (a historically fraught phrase that does not appear in the Tk’emlúps 2021 press release). Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops. But it was not proven to be true in May, 2021. It is not proven to be true today.
Did the Globe and Mail profit from the belated realization that it had gotten the Kamloops story completely wrong?
Sadly, no. Throughout the rest of the 30 May 2026 article, the Globe and Mail makes one false and unsubstantiated claim after another, beginning with the issue of deaths at Indian residential schools, about which it erroneously states:
3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
3200 children did not die at residential schools, nor did the TRC make that claim. The TRC report (see attachment) states that only 423 named children died on the premises of an Indian residential school. To put that number in perspective, that’s 423 children out of the 150,000 children alleged to have attended the 139 schools over a period of 133 years, or a little over 3 deaths a year in the entire residential school system.
The Globe and Mail article also states:
Residential school students died at a rate far higher than children in the rest of Canada — a negligence so deep-rooted that it came “within unpleasant nearness” of manslaughter, according to a government official in the early 1900s.
The reason children at Indian residential schools died at a higher rate than children in the rest of Canada is that the entire Indian population died at a higher rate than the general population. As explained here and here, the mortality rate among Indians was much higher than the mortality rate in the general population due to disease, primarily TB, which resulted from lack of sanitary knowledge on the reserves.
Dr Peter Bryce, Medical Inspector for the Department of the Interior and the Department of Indian Affairs, wrote in the DIA Annual Report for 1906 that the indigenous population of Canada was declining, despite a high birth rate. He ascribed the decline to disease, estimating that ‘the Indian population of Canada has a mortality rate of more than double that of the whole population, and in some provinces more than three times’, and that ‘the one dominating cause of the excessive mortality everywhere is this lack of sanitary knowledge or of how to live in houses, and that the death-rate is due to the same cause, tuberculosis’.
Significantly, in a 1909 study, Bryce found that almost all Indian children came to the residential schools already infected with TB, usually in a latent form which might or might not develop into active TB. In other words, Indian children contracted TB at home on the reserves, and brought it to the schools.
As for the Globe and Mail’s claim that a ‘government official’ considered deaths at Indian residential schools to be attributable to a deep-rooted negligence unpleasantly close to manslaughter, everything about the Globe and Mail’s version is factually inaccurate.
The source — which the Globe and Mail fails to provide — is a letter by Samuel Hume Blake published in a pamphlet entitled ‘To the Members of the Board of Management of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada’ (see attachment, pp. 21-3).
Blake was not a ‘government official’, as falsely claimed by the Globe and Mail, and the statement in his letter to the Honourable Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior, on 27 January 1907 was not about residential schools.
In fact, in his letter Blake made the same point Dr Peter Bryce had made in 1906 — that lack of sanitation in Indian homes on reserves led inevitably to TB, and to an appalling number of deaths. As a solution, Blake recommended that the Department of Indian Affairs set up at least 50 nursing stations in the Northwest to instruct Indian women and children about these ‘domestic matters’ connected with hygiene.
Blake wrote:
1. If you seek to draw the Indian from the wigwam and out-of-door life, you must educate him in the ordinary hygienic rules—the non-observance of which cultivates tuberculosis and scrofulous affections—principal causes in the high death rate. The appalling number of deaths among the younger children appeals loudly to the guardians of our Indians. In doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death, brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.
(a) Let there be in at least fifty carefully chosen centres in the North West a thoroughly trained nurse appointed to carry on this work, and to give systematic instruction to the Indian women and children in regard to those domestic matters, of which they, in their new life, are ignorant, and which make so much for the health and happiness of these fellow-beings so largely dependent upon us.
In the balance of his lengthy letter, Blake went on to make a number of recommendations about Indian education, but said nothing about deaths at Indian residential schools.
The Globe and Mail then goes on in the 30 May 2026 article to make excuses for former BC Premier John Horgan:
Politicians also helped to fuel public perceptions that the bodies of hundreds of children had been found. John Horgan, then B.C. premier, called Kamloops “a tragedy of unimaginable proportions” in the wake of the initial announcement. Mr. Horgan had no way of knowing whether that was true.
Of course Premier Horgan had a way of knowing whether the Kamloops Band’s claim was true. The Globe and Mail and the City Council in Kamloops had advance notice of the Kamloops Band’s claim. It is unthinkable that the Kamloops Band would have given a heads-up to the Kamloops City Council and the Globe and Mail without also giving a heads-up to the Premier of British Columbia. All Premier Horgan had to do was ask the RCMP and the BC Coroner to investigate, and to insist that the Kamloops Band not recklessly send out a media release until the RCMP and the Coroner had completed their investigations.
The Globe and Mail article of 30 May 2026 is a unsettling testimony to the state of journalism in Canada. The Globe and Mail admits that it utterly failed to get the Canadian news story of the century right, but in the process further misleads Canadians on every additional point addressed in the article.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Has Kimberly Murray eroded confidence in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada
Or, by contributing to our Donor Box:
If you are looking for investigative journalists the caliber of Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame you are not likely to find them at the Globe and Mail. What you will find instead are cookie cutter copies of CBC's Chief Political Correspondent, Rosemary Barton, who by virtue of her position, feels entitled to make unsubstantiated claims about indigenous graves simply because that appears to be the accepted political opinion of which she views as politically correct. Critical thinking, which should be the prerequisite for investigative journalism, has been replaced by the easier and much more convenient "cut and paste" journalism which requires very little independent thinking.
The Globe also sticks with the CBC falsehood that Indian parents were forced to send their children to residential schools. The truth is that compulsory attendance for Indians wasn’t introduced until 1920, and then parents could choose day schools or residential schools. Most chose day schools. Only if no day school was available did children - including white children - have to go to a residential school. So if there was a cultural genocide it would mean that the parents who chose to send their children to residential schools would be the guilty parties. That, of course, is nonsense - as is the CBC’s “forced to attend”