Rachel Blaney’s Rant about Media and Aaron Gunn

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Michelle Stirling ©2025

Outgoing NDP MP Rachel Blaney of North Island-Powell River posted a rant to Facebook the other day, and she had a number of points – some of which I agree with, and some I don’t. She is outraged that Aaron Gunn is a candidate in the upcoming election, largely because Gunn has said in the past that there was no genocide, related to Indian Residential Schools.

She was angry that 99.7 The River “My Campbell River Now” reporter had erred in a news story. She said:

“..but it's quite shocking that a journalist would not check their facts and publish something uh without checking their facts. That's not what journalism is. We're seeing a lot more of that where people are just saying what their ideas or thoughts are but not actually doing factchecking.”

So, in my opinion, that’s good! She sees lack of factchecking as a media problem.

Blaney went on to say she would be “writing a letter to them to share my concerns about the fact that something was published that created an uproar …uh for people and started all this hatemongering and I think that's wrong.”

I agree with that, too!

Case in point. The Kamloops First Nation’s claim of May 27, 2021, that human remains of the bodies of 215 children had been found in mass, unmarked graves in the orchard near the Kamloops Indian Residential School started all this hatemongering. Who was at fault? The Kamloops First Nation and the unquestioning media!

It is curious to me that the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) work of the alleged mass graves site was done over the May long weekend, using the funding for an expired grant from Heritage Canada, intended to spruce up the Heritage Park the band had built – on areas where they claim children were clandestinely buried!

The Kamloops Band spokespeople like Diena Jules, in CBC’s Fifth Estate documentary “The Reckoning” say she and other band members like the Knowledge Keepers “always knew” there were children’s bodies there in unmarked graves.

Curiously, her brother, Manny Jules, was Chief at the time the Heritage Park was built. Did he not know; did no one tell him? Manny also appears in “The Reckoning.”

As per Blaney’s point on lax media, no one at CBC did any fact-checking.

Likewise, the person in charge of the GPR work, Sarah Beaulieu, did not do any fact-checking either. That’s bad!

It would be normal procedure, before making such a controversial announcement of finding human remains and mass, unmarked graves, to do at least a cursory fact check of previous land use. Of course, on a long weekend, such offices would have been closed. But why publicly announce what many would have known was a lie?

Such a check would have discovered a few things:

a) In the 1920’s, 2000 feet of septic trenches had been dug in exactly the same place as the claimed unmarked graves;

b) An old apple orchard had been removed in the 1990’s and based on planting patterns recommended at the time, there would have been 216 impressions left of roots;

c) Truckloads of fill dirt had been dumped in the area. While this revelation is recent and comes from a member of the Kamloops First Nation who has come forward to talk with Rebel Media’s Drea Humphrey, there would certainly have been some historic records either with the band or the regional land use authorities.

Think of the virulent hatred the fake news of “mass graves” and “human remains” created worldwide and within Canada. Certainly, GPR cannot “see” human remains or coffins, even if they were there. But gullible media reported the news as if GPR did find bodies and graves, as did supposed scientific experts in material evidence, like the Canadian Archeology Association.

Canadian Archeology Association president Lisa Hodgetts, who also appeared at the press conference in support of the findings, said it was unfortunate that “it took this science to wake the world up to the truth that survivors and their communities have known for years, and is so clearly documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports from 2015.”

Then the hate fest began. Over a hundred churches were burnt down or vandalized.

Thanks to gullible, compliant media and no factchecking on the part of ‘experts.’

Legal “experts” consulted also failed to note the fundamental premise of Canadian law – “presumption of innocence.”

Rachel Blaney also ignores this fact. No one has ever been charged or convicted of genocide in Canada.

Except in the press. Trial by public hanging with no evidence.

In Blaney’s rant, she is furious about the fact that many people want evidence to prove the claims of this alleged genocide, meaning that if there are identified unmarked graves, then excavations and exhumations should take place to prove the claim one way or the other. Indeed, such places of alleged mass violence should have been marked off as crime scenes, secured and investigated by the RCMP. Instead, authority over the site at Kamloops was given over to the Kamloops First Nation. This is unheard of in major crime investigations. The site has not been secured except by the Band which now claims it to be sacred and untouchable.

Similarly, the Williams Lake First Nation has also declared that they have found shifting numbers of somewhere between 93, 159 or 55 unmarked graves, deceased or disappeared. Not only was their site at St. Joseph’s Mission not secured by the RCMP, but the province of British Columbia gave the Williams Lake First Nation some $800,000 to purchase the old St. Joseph’s Mission and land, meaning no one can investigate without permission from the Band.

Think of this on a personal scale. If someone accused you of murdering their loved ones and clandestinely burying them, would you want the police to investigate and clear your name? And if the claimed burial site was on land owned by that accuser, who then claimed the land was sacred and no investigation could proceed, would you see this as fair due process of law? Or would you find it to be fishy? Wouldn’t you resent being smeared as guilty with no ability to clear your name?

This is the state of Canada today. This is ugly.

Thanks to no factchecking by the media, and thanks to continuous public persecution of Canadians by people like Rachel Blaney everyone is supposed to wear a hair shirt and repent over a crime that has not been prosecuted.

The rest of Blaney’s rant also needs a factcheck.

About 4:44 Blaney claims that stories were passed on from Indigenous generation to generation about Indigenous children who were never seen again. Since only about 1/3 of all eligible children ever went to Indian Residential Schools, and about 1/3 to day schools on reserve, it seems likely that the 1/3 who never went to any school at all misunderstood or just made-up reasons as to why some people “disappeared.”

Some children who went to school, if they became ill with Tuberculosis (TB), would have been sent on for care in a sanatorium. Some did die. They did “disappear.” For those who underwent successful treatment, this was often months or years in length, meaning a 7-year-old who went to Indian Residential School, but returned home at age 13 from the TB sanatorium, it would be as if the original 7- year-old “disappeared” and a stranger reappeared in their place, years later.

As I have written elsewhere:

Moffat et al (2013) in “Sanitoriums and the Canadian Colonial Legacy: The Untold Experiences of Tuberculosis Treatment” note that “within the context of TB, public health officials were granted the authority to coercively institutionalize the affected, forcibly removing infected individuals and placing them in sanitoriums (Shedden, 2011)”. Due to the long treatment periods, contact with family, culture and heritage was lost. One aboriginal testimonial in Moffat reads: “My brother went to the sanitorium and stayed there for seven years because he was allergic to the medication. It took seven years for the tuberculosis to go dormant. I never knew my brother. My older sister has no memory of him. My siblings never met their brother until he was thirteen. He was a total stranger. That’s the emotional part — that we had a brother we never knew.”

Likewise, residential school classes were only provided to teens until age 16, which, back in the day, was considered the age of maturity. Some students simply moved on to jobs, marriage, travel, the military. Of those who claim a genocide happened, none of them can provide a list of names of children who went missing and whose cases were never resolved.

Who are these alleged victims of genocide? Why has no one spoken up until now?

Blaney also claims that “…you’re given blankets that are toxic, you die from them where whole communities went from big communities down to 67 people…”

Factcheck.

That never happened.

While it is true that some diseases like typhus, small pox and Spanish Flu wiped out large numbers of people, it was the virulent nature of the disease, not infected blankets.

White people were also vastly affected by diseases like small pox, Spanish Flu, and Tuberculosis, which was the largest killer of all Canadians until the 1950s. The communal living habits and lack of modern methods of sanitation of Indigenous people (which the children were rigorously taught in schools as preventative health care) contributed to their higher infection and death rates.

Research by Prof. Jacques Rouillard provides these insights:

“…Tuberculosis continued to be the leading cause of death among Indians. Death rates from this disease are from ten to thirty times higher than among the white population. During the year over 1,500 Indians were treated for this disease in hospitals and sanatoria, with an average of slightly over 800 under treatment. Surveys in co-operation with the Provincial Health Departments were held in eight provinces and as many as possible of the active case's discovered were brought under treatment.

There is at present a shortage of sanatorium beds and many Indians are on waiting lists for treatment. In 1941, the last year in which complete figures are available, the Indian death rate from tuberculosis was lowered by ten per cent.

The Indian Affairs Branch operates fourteen departmental hospitals solely for Indians, with a total bed capacity of 540. More than half of these beds are occupied by cases of tuberculosis. Staff problems have been greatly aggravated by war conditions, but it has been possible to provide full treatment facilities at costs considerably below what the Department is called upon to pay in outside hospitals.

The Branch has continued its scientific investigations of nutritional diseases among Indians, caused by deficiencies in their diet. A campaign has been undertaken to improve the food habits of the Indians by health education, stressing the use of dairy products, gardening, and the proper cooking of vegetables. Much of the blindness among Indians has been traced to vitamin deficiencies.”

Report of the Director, Dr. H.W. McGILL, Department of Mines and Resources, Report of Indian Affair’s Branch, 1943.

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/aanc-inac/R1-91-1943-eng.pdf

Blaney also claims her husband is a residential school survivor. According to historical records, he went to day school on reserve and his parents sent him to Sechelt Indian Residential School so that he would not be stuck with only a Grade 6 education.

According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, as outlined above, it appears that the Sechelt facility was at the end of its life as an Indian Residential School when he attended.

The residential school aspect was being phased out when Darren Blaney went there in 1972, and Darren Blaney would have lived at the school but attended public school classes in Sechelt. He went to the school in Mission the following year.

However, St. Mary's at Mission was a residence-only from 1968 on. All of the residents went to public schools by day. That means that unlike residential schools, where one might have a personality conflict or some other peril from an instructor, administrator or student, and you had to just “bear with it” just as all boarding school students around the world have to do to this day, the residence was only for sleeping and the public school was separate, with a different set of teachers and mix of students.

This is from the NCTR website on St. Mary's.

As noted above, by the time Darren Blaney arrived at St. Mary’s, the Catholic Oblates were no longer running the school. It was a government run facility. Furthermore, as noted, it was not a residential school, either. The young people lived in residence but attended public school in town.

So, Darren Blaney is a survivor, like most children, of parents making sure their children are schooled.

In Rachel Blaney’s rant, at about 6:00 in, she claims that in the House of Commons it was said that we should “kill the Indian in the child.”

Fact-check.

That never happened.

It is ugly and deceitful to say that it did.

“Kill the Indian in the child” was a phrase falsely incorporated into Canadian history by John Milloy. In fact, the Canadian government’s position was:

“It was never the policy, nor the end and aim of the endeavour to transform an Indian into a white man. Speaking in the widest terms, the provision of education for the Indian is the attempt to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment.”

Blaney goes on with some oblique reference to “testing on children” is genocide.

Is she referring to nutritional supplement tests that were done, offering one group vitamins and maintaining the regular diet of a control group? This is certainly not an example of genocide.

So, there we have the good, the bad and the ugly of Rachel Blaney’s rant, with a fact check on pretty much all of it.

Just imagine if someone on the Kamloops First Nation on May 27, 2021, had said, “Wait, let’s do a factcheck, before we claim we found a mass grave. What if it is old ground disturbances like septic trenches?”

Just imagine if the federal government had insisted on reserving judgement, rather than jumping on the genocide bandwagon, lowering flags and cancelling Canada Day without an iota of evidence.

It is likely that the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would never have been rammed through the House of Commons without the ghastly Kamloops claim as emotional rocket fuel to push it through and silence dissent. UNDRIP received Royal Assent on June 21, 2021, less than a month after the Kamloops claim. Thus, it is unlikely that China would have accused Canada of genocide on the world stage, which they did, the day after on June 22, 2021, citing the Kamloops find as proof. No questions?

Imagine if the CBC’s Fifth Estate had been as meticulous in “The Reckoning” with the Jules Family of the Kamloops First Nations and their claims, as they were about absolutely destroying the reputation of Buffy Ste. Marie? Did no one at CBC think to ask the Jules family and the Thirteen Grassroots Families why, in their grief, they demanded taxation in this petition, published on Oct. 18, 2021, in the Globe and Mail? Why did they feel empowered to make all these demands based on unproven claims of genocide?

If some journos had done some factchecking; if the Kamloops Band and the government had not jumped the gun, things would be so much different.

Canada would have been much the same country as it was in 2015, prior to the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports and their “Missing Children” addendum that was born in secret and never part of their mandate.

Instead, Canada is now suffering from a phantom genocide promoted by people like Rachel Blaney and media pundits who never bothered to do a factcheck before spewing their blood libel on Catholics and Christians, Canadian history and by extension, all Canadians.

No one has been charged or proven guilty of any of these horrific claims. Every factcheck that I do shows these claims to be false. I call upon all Canadians to stand up for our presumed innocence and most of all, to be Sorry No More.

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