The Spectator, August 5, Robert Tombs
Readers would doubtless find it hard to believe that the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh kidnapped and killed indigenous children while on a state visit to Canada in 1964. Yet this story circulated for years in Canada along with other horror stories of the rape, torture and murder of indigenous children at the hands of depraved priests and nuns. The bodies, it was said, were thrown into furnaces or secretly buried at dead of night. These accusations were linked to boarding schools run by various religious bodies first established in the 19th century and finally closed in the 1990s. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in 2008, and millions of dollars were given by the government to search for clandestine mass graves. None was found.
Then, in 2021, a single survey of an orchard at Kamloops in British Columbia by a young anthropologist using ground-penetrating radar found ‘disturbances in the ground’, and this was taken as proof of a mass grave of hundreds of children. Soon other communities announced that they too had found forgotten cemeteries, and the media portrayed these as hidden mass graves, implying terrible crimes. Canada descended into a frenzy of allegation and public self-flagellation. Dozens of churches were vandalised or burnt down, and the Trudeau government ordered the national flag to be flown at half-mast for several months. The Pope apologised, as did the Archbishop of Canterbury. China denounced Canada at the UN. But no investigation has been made of the site at Kamloops and no bodies have been found there.
Click here to read the piece in full.