(LifeSiteNews) – Canada’s Ministry of Indigenous Relations was reprimanded for breaching an Act of Parliament for sealing records on the yet unproven residential school grave claims and has now been ordered to release records.
Recently, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty was mandated to release files it has pertaining to the 2021 claims by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, who said it found graves of 215 children at a former residential school. It has thus far tried to seal “confidential information” records it has on the matter.
Commissioner Caroline Maynard wrote that “The department must respond to the request without further delay.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is, after four years, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools
However, as the claims went unfounded, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic and many of them on Indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada since the spring of 2021.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation received around $12.1 million in funding that was supposed to be for “exhumation of remains.”
The First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021, when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar.
In order to get the funding, the First Nation was mandated to submit regular Activity Progress Reports. On December 15, 2025, Alty’s department tried to seal all records that were sought by Blacklock’s Reporter.
Blacklock’s Reporter had asked in a second request for “all Activity Progress Reports regarding the Tk’emlups Indian Residential School Survivor Project or any related ‘missing children’ program.”
“In total, 576 pages of relevant records were received,” the information commissioner wrote.
However, the department claimed that due to being overworked, it did not “have sufficient capacity to start the analysis of this file.”
Maynard rejected the excuse by the department, noting, “I find the time taken by the department to advance the processing of this request unacceptable.
“Nothing in the Access To Information Act allows the department to delay processing requests due to limited staff or other competing priorities,” she added.
The commissioner added that “any additional time that is taken to respond to this request is another day by which the complainant’s rights of access are being denied.”
“This lack of responsiveness is in clear contravention of the department’s obligations under the Act and undermines the credibility of the access system,” he wrote.
Soon after the Kamloops announcement in 2021, other regions claimed the presence of “unmarked graves,” prompting now-former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with the help of all other parties, including the Conservatives, to declare the residential school program a “genocide” despite the lack of evidence.
To date, there has been no parliamentary committee that has looked into the Kamloops mass graves story, which has been called a “hoax” by many prominent Canadians.
Late last year, as reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian academic Frances Widdowson, who spoke out against claims there are mass unmarked graves of kids on former Indigenous residential schools, was arrested on a university campus as a result of trespassing. He is fighting back with the help of a top constitutional group.
Last year, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the former Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children.
People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier condemned the residential school “genocide” narrative as a “hoax” on last year’s Truth and Reconciliation Day.
