After Dozens of Churches Burned, Canada’s Globe & Mail Admits It Dropped the Ball on Kamloops Mass Graves

So how does this work, @LeahGazan
Does the entire editorial staff of the Globe & Mail go to jail, or just the editorial board ? pic.twitter.com/02iheiVx3q

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 30, 2026

For years, the media in Canada pushed the narrative that the Catholic Church in the country, specifically Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows in Manitoba and other churches and a residential school in Kamloops, were sites of mass graves where the Catholic Church buried the bodies of indigenous people.

As of 2023, no bodies had been found in any of these sites, but at least 68 Christian churches in the country had been vandalized or destroyed via arson.

Now, finally, Canada’s Globe & Mail admitted it never scrutinized the false claims that led to the Kamloops scandal.

Wow. The editorial board of the Globe & Mail just flat out admitted that it screwed up by failing to scrutinize the false 2021 claims that “unmarked graves” had been “confirmed” at Kamloops. It’s taken five years, which is a disgrace, but give them credit for finally saying it https://t.co/DJdPpZrt5F pic.twitter.com/fa7YDmX2bm

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 30, 2026

Here’s more:

But the converse is also true. The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools. That 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).

Ah, so the media believed the story without fact-checking, because it checked all the right narrative boxes. Only now, that destruction has happened, do they retract the story.

Remember, the government tried to use the story to criminalize ‘residential school denialism.’

So how does this work, @LeahGazan
Does the entire editorial staff of the Globe & Mail go to jail, or just the editorial board ? pic.twitter.com/02iheiVx3q

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 30, 2026

Yes, inquiring minds want to know.

Over 100 Canadian churches were burned over this hoax. Over 30 were completely destroyed. All over a lie. https://t.co/NWTASmquD5

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) May 31, 2026

It’s almost like the destruction was the point.

This revelation has even gotten the attention of the U.S. State Department.

In 2021, Canadian media and institutions basically hallucinated the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave near a former Catholic residential school. The evidence: radar saw soil disturbances that could have been tree roots. A wave of church arsons ensued.

People… https://t.co/STpXZP6lq3

— Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers (@UnderSecPD) June 1, 2026

Rogers wrote:

People making the case for censorship often urge that destructive manias like this can be suppressed/soothed if we prevent people from communicating about them. And here was a perfect case: false information was being recklessly (or maliciously) amplified, leading to literal hate crimes. Shouldn’t the censors do something?

But the mass-grave craze infected the censorship class, so opposition got targeted instead.  At least one “disinformation” NGO categorized skepticism as “hate speech,” and Canada even saw efforts to criminalize so-called “denialism” (drawing an absurd comparison to the Holocaust).

Good for the Globe and Mail to come clean.

Now there needs to be consequences. The Left wanted to criminalize ‘residential school denialism,’ and the same standard should apply to the news story that pushed a false narrative and led to the destruction of more than 30 churches.

Daily reminder: https://t.co/ualN6dEN47 pic.twitter.com/ddDVRrkouf

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) June 1, 2026

The false story got the views. The reality did not. Every single time.

You don’t get any credit for doing this years after the truth was known. Churches were burned, and it’s their fault. https://t.co/UiV2UudgrH

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) May 31, 2026

No credit whatsoever.

This offers praise too easily. This journalistic malpractice wasn’t benign; it had real victims. It promoted a narrative that allowed people like @JimMcMurtry01 and @FrancesWiddows1 to suffer real loss. It carried water for institutions like @BCLawSociety to misinform a… https://t.co/apnzdFIakC

— Dwayne Chomyn (@Citizen004) May 31, 2026

There can be no reconciliation without truth, and there can be no reconciliation without consequences. At a minimum, anyone at the Globe & Mail who failed to verify this story should be fired.