The Canadian government is flirting with a dangerous, deeply lazy shortcut.
For months, federal officials have danced around the idea of outlawing "residential school denialism"—effectively making it a crime to downplay, distort, or deny the horrors of the residential school system. It sounds noble. It feels righteous. It is designed to signal unyielding solidarity with Indigenous survivors.
It is also an absolute disaster in the making.
When Justice Minister David Lametti previously appointed a special interlocutor to look into this, the mainstream media immediately fell into its usual, predictable rhythm. The consensus emerged almost instantly: hate speech laws are good, denial is bad, therefore outlawing denial is a moral imperative. Anyone questioning this logic is quietly painted as a sympathizer to bigots.
But this lazy consensus completely misses the mechanics of how hate, history, and law actually interact.
By trying to legislate historical truth, the government is about to hand grifters, conspiracy theorists, and genuine racists the greatest gift they could ever ask for: martyrdom, a massive megaphone, and a legitimate claim to state censorship.
The Martyrdom Machine: How Ban Laws Fuel the Fire
Let's dismantle the central premise of this proposed legislation. The theory goes that if you make a harmful statement illegal, that statement disappears from public discourse.
This is a childish understanding of human psychology and modern communication.
When you outlaw an opinion, you do not erase it. You drive it underground, where it ferments, mutates, and gains the intoxicating allure of "forbidden knowledge."
The Streisand Effect on Steroids
Imagine a scenario where a fringe blogger publishes a poorly researched, deeply offensive piece claiming the harms of residential schools were "exaggerated." In the current ecosystem, that post gets forty views, three angry comments, and dies a quiet death in the dusty corners of the internet.
Now, apply the proposed law.
- The blogger is arrested or fined.
- They immediately brand themselves a "free speech warrior."
- Crowdfunding campaigns launch, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for their legal defense.
- Mainstream media outlets—obligated to cover the trial of a citizen prosecuted for writing words—broadcast the blogger's name, face, and core arguments to millions of households.
- The fringe ideas are suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, packaged as the "truths the government wants to hide."
By criminalizing the speech, you have elevated a pathetic outlier into a cultural hero for the contrarian right. You have given their ideas millions of dollars in free publicity.
I have watched organizations and governments play this game of whack-a-mole for over a decade. Every single time a state tries to use the blunt instrument of the criminal code to police historical narrative, they end up supercharging the exact ideas they wanted to kill.
The Trap of Definition: Who Decides What is "Denial"?
To prosecute a crime, you need a precise legal definition. This is where the entire concept of criminalizing denialism collapses under its own weight.
What, legally speaking, constitutes "denialism" or "downplaying"?
- Is it denying that the schools existed? (Virtually no one does this).
- Is it disputing the specific number of undocumented deaths at a particular site?
- Is it debating the administrative intent behind the system in 1880 versus 1950?
- Is it questioning the archaeological methodology used in ground-penetrating radar surveys before excavation has occurred?
These are vastly different categories of speech. One is raw bigotry; others are matters of historical, journalistic, and scientific inquiry.
If you draft the law too broadly, you criminalize legitimate academic skepticism and investigative journalism. If you draft it too narrowly, the law becomes completely toothless, rendering the entire political circus pointless.
+-----------------------------+------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Type of Speech | Under Free Debate | Under Criminalization |
+-----------------------------+------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Outright Malicious Denial | Ignored, debunked, socially ruined | Prosecuted, martyred, publicized |
| Academic Methodology Debate | Refined through peer review | Chilled by fear of prosecution |
| Investigative Journalism | Exposes truths, corrects errors | Blocked by legal liability |
+-----------------------------+------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
When you weaponize the criminal code to protect historical narratives, you hand the keys of historical truth to crown prosecutors and judges. We must ask ourselves: do we really trust a systemically flawed justice system—the very system that historically facilitated the residential school apparatus—to be the final, infallible arbiter of how we are allowed to talk about that history?
The irony is staggering.
Dismantling the "People Also Ask" Consensus
Whenever this debate arises, defenders of the legislation point to European laws against Holocaust denial as proof that this works.
This is a false equivalence.
"If Germany banned Holocaust denial, why shouldn't Canada ban residential school denial?"
Germany’s laws were forged in the immediate aftermath of a total societal collapse, designed to prevent the literal reconstitution of a genocidal regime that had just industrialized murder on a continental scale.
Furthermore, decades of criminological data from Europe show that Germany's laws have not eliminated antisemitism or far-right extremism. In fact, German far-right parties have consistently weaponized their "suppressed" status to recruit members, using coded language that bypasses the law while retaining the exact same hateful core.
Using the state's monopoly on violence to enforce historical consensus does not change minds. It merely teaches bigots to become better rhetoricians. They stop saying "it didn't happen" and start saying "the state is hiding the files that prove our point."
"Doesn't doing nothing harm survivors?"
This question presents a false dichotomy: either we throw people in prison for lying about history, or we do nothing.
The most effective weapon against historical distortion is not a jail cell; it is unassailable, accessible evidence.
Instead of spending millions of dollars prosecuting fringe internet trolls, the federal government should be funding the immediate, unfettered release of all remaining provincial, federal, and church records. They should be funding the actual forensic work, the excavations, and the community-led investigations that survivors have been begging for.
Truth does not need a prison guard. Lies thrive in secrecy; they wither under relentless, well-funded exposure.
The Real Danger: A Cheap Substitute for Action
Let’s be brutally honest about why politicians love this proposed law.
Criminalizing speech is incredibly cheap. It requires no infrastructure, no structural reform, no clean drinking water, and no land restitution. It is a pure, performative press release packaged as policy.
It allows the state to say, "Look how seriously we take reconciliation—we made it illegal to disagree with us," while simultaneously fighting Indigenous children in court over compensation claims.
It is a smoke screen.
By focusing the national conversation on whether some fringe actors should go to jail for writing offensive tweets, the government successfully diverts public attention away from its own ongoing, systemic failures. It trades tangible progress for a culture war victory.
We are letting them get away with it.
Stop trying to fix historical debate with handcuffs. Release the records. Support the communities. Let the truth do the heavy lifting, and let the deniers expose themselves as the irrelevant relics they are.
