BC mayor barred from council committees over book he says he never even read

Mayor of Quesnel, BC, Ron Paull was censured by town council Tuesday because his wife allegedly circulated a book that raised questions about indigenous residential schools. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in January called for a probe into the claim of hundreds of unmarked graves in Kamloops, BC. To date, no graves have been found. Upon a censure vote by council Tuesday, Paull, who says he has “not even read the book,” was removed from city committees, stripped of his travel and lobbying budgets, and barred from visiting First Nations lands. In March, the First Nations tribe Lhtako Dene told city council they had learned Paull's wife had circulated copies of a book investigating the history of residential schools in Canada, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) within the community and local school board. Paull was notified by the chief administrative officer after the complaint was filed. The Lhatko Dene then said they will no longer cooperate with the mayor and council and that Paull is prohibited from entering the territory without express invitation. Some weeks later, on April 2, the mayor brought a copy of the book to a meeting in Cariboo Regional District. The presence of the book was discovered, and staff claimed Paull brought it with the intent to circulate it. Paull said he brought the book to show it to two of his colleagues after the meeting. He was curious what he thought the regional library would do with such a book. "This is all based on a misunderstanding," Paull told council before the vote Tuesday, per the Canadian Press. "I have not read the book," he said. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs in solidarity with the Lhtako Dene claimed the book “essentially questions the very existence of residential schools and their well-documented harms against indigenous peoples."The sanctions will be reevaluated in 90 days, council voted, and a “sincere” apology is expected from the mayor. The book, part of which was published on the website of Canadian independent, non-partisan research organization the Fraser Institute, "demonstrates that all the major elements of the Kamloops narrative are either false or highly exaggerated.”Its authors, CP Champion and Tom Flanagan, assert there have been “no unmarked graves discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere—not one.”Despite 20 announcements of soil “anomalies” discovered near residential schools across Canada as of August 2023, “most have not even been excavated, so what, if anything, lies beneath the surface remains unknown.”“Where excavations have taken place, no burials related to residential schools have been found,” the authors write. “In other words, there are no ‘missing children.’”“The fate of some children may have been forgotten with the passage of generations—forgotten by their own families, that is. But ‘forgotten’ is not the same as ‘missing.’”According to Champion and Flanagan, the “myth of missing students” can be traced back to the Trudeau Liberal’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission failed to “cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them,” they wrote. “The documentation exists, but the commissioners did not avail themselves of it.”Upon the claims of “missing children” from residential schools and “hundreds of unmarked graves,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Global News on June 21, 2021 published Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s heartfelt apology for the “incredibly harmful” Government of Canada policies that led to an alleged “estimated 751 unmarked graves” found at a residential school site in Saskatchewan. Weeks earlier, allegations of another 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops, BC, were made. “Specifically to the members of the Cowessess community and Treaty Four communities, we are sorry. It was something that we cannot undo in the past, but we can pledge ourselves every day to fix in the present and into the future,” said Trudeau at the time. “That means recognizing the harms, the impacts, the inter-generational trauma, the cycles of challenges that far too many indigenous peoples face in this country because of actions that the federal government and other partners deliberately and willingly undertook.”Trudeau then mandated all Canadian flags in the country to be lowered to half mass, where they stayed for longer than five months. He also invented the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to start to make amends with Canada’s indigenous population. A Truth and Reconciliation day, a special and somber holiday to honour indigenous peoples, was established for September 30. Trudeau, however, skipped the first Truth and Reconciliation ceremony with First Nations groups, and was spotted surfing in Tofino instead.