OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – A new bill looks to give jail time to people who engage in so-called “Denialism” and question the media and government narrative surrounding Canada’s “Indian Residential School system” that there are mass graves despite no evidence to support this claim.
The private members’ Bill C-254, An Act To Amend The Criminal Code, introduced by New Democrat MP Leah Gazan, would give out stiff penalties to deniers, saying the bill is needed to “end Residential School denialism.”
Gazan said that her bill is for all “Residential School survivors and our families.”
She said that so-called “denialism is spreading, twisting facts, denying genocide and reigniting harm,” adding, “It is not only hurtful, it is dangerous.”
Bill C-254, should it become law, would give a maximum two-year jail sentence for people who “other than in private conversation willfully promotes hatred against Indigenous people by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian Residential School system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.”
The bill does read that exceptions are given for people who “establish the statements communicated were true” or if the statements are “relevant to any subject of public interest.”
This is not the first time Gazan has tried to get such a bill passed. A bill she previously brought forth that sought to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system, once operating in Canada, was a “genocide,” lapsed after an election was called.
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.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, John Carpay, founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), blasted what he said are “false” and “virtue-signaling” displays of “truth and reconciliation” goals pushed by the federal government and media when it comes to indigenous “land acknowledgments.”
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, since the spring of 2021, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.
Recent polling has shown that over two-thirds of Canadians want some kind of proof of the “unmarked graves” before believing the claims that Indigenous children were secretly murdered and buried at residential schools by Catholic clergy.
