A “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that doesn’t seem to care too much about truth and doesn’t achieve real reconciliation? Sounds about right.
Incidentally, this story just adds to the already long list of reasons that the oft-promoted reparations for slavery would be such a terrible idea: they wouldn’t be the end but just the beginning, would not achieve closure nor appease the grievance industry. Admit guilt and reap the whirlwind.

The grievance industry in Canada is alive and well.
We do live in a post-truth society.
Google:
MMIWG final report quietly altered after CBC inquired about errors
Kudos to UnHerd for this article.

Reminiscent of the ‘satanic abuse’ fantasy a few years back, or more recently ‘Nick’ and the Westminster paedo ring. In an age of so-called fact-checking, most journalists are no longer interested in establishing the truth, just in producing sensational copy for their preferred outrage filter. Bravo to Mr Flanagan.

The Woking Class that has usurped power throughout Western democracies has zero moral compass. This is not the ‘dumb decade’ but the ‘destruction of democracy decade’. It is profoundly depressing to witness the outputs of thousands of years of civilisation and human development, generally for the better, being ruthlessly dismantled along with basic truth. I fear this will be unintended legacy our children will inherit. ‘Truth & Reconciliation’ – what a cynical inversion of today’s reality!

It is extraordinary how much is wrong or misleading in this article. Right of the top, Flanagan’s figure of 68 churches “vandalised or even burned to the ground” may be accurate but elides the fact that only 20 churches suffered from arson and only a few (very regrettably) burned to the ground.
It is heartless to say that there were no “missing children” despite the fact that thousands of First Nations and Inuit children who were sent to residential schools never returned to their parents. While Flannagan blandly claims that “some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities,” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population. It identified 3,200 deaths in residential schools and found that for most of the schools’ history, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities. While Flanagan claims that “children were carefully tracked in the residential school system,” the TRC found that for1/3 of deaths, the government and the schools did not even record the name of the student who died and for just under 1/2, the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.
The legalistic argument that “it wasn’t until 1920 that school attendance was made compulsory for Indian children” has nothing to do with lived reality that saw Indian agents and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police enforce attendance to differing degrees in different regions by using the threat of arrest or the withholding of relief or rations. As Flanagan well knows, the administration of Indian Affairs in Canada was frequently marked by violations of legal rules adopted by the Canadian state, or by enforcement of rules that had no legal authority. Thus, for half a century, the coming and going of First Nations members on prairie reserves was controlled by a pass system enforced by Indian agents though it had no basis in the Indian Act.
Flanagan seems nostalgic for an era “prior to 1990,” when “residential schools enjoyed largely favourable coverage in the media,” yet the subsequent accounts of sexual and severe physical abuse were not isolated incidents but repeated by literally tens of thousands of survivors in testimony that was not accepted uncritically but tested before adjudicators in countless individual hearings. Despite lacklustre investigations and prosecutions, former residential school employees who admitted to dozens of victims of sexual abuse were sent to prison, one of them referred to by the sentencing judge as a sexual sadist.
Flanagan’s account of historic abuse as a “money-maker” refers first, to class actions that have often reduced rather than extended federal government liability by keeping cases out of court and even restricting how victims can seek redress, a benefit given that there are no limitations periods for sexual abuse in Canada. (Let us also note the irony of Flanagan denouncing the settlement of litigation by government after the numerous cases in which he was the government’s paid expert witness against Aboriginal parties.) Second, to describe as a “money-maker” the need for government to fund the search for and protection of sites where residential school students were buried shows Flanagan’s disregard for the humanity of those who died there and their families: who else but the federal government should pay for this after they took the children away, failed to return their bodies and saw to their burial in unmarked graves?

Well, it is said that money is the root of all evil, so one doesn’t have to look too hard to find the incentive which drives much of this, whereas those deciding that the quickest and most ‘virtuous’ way of avoiding trouble by paying up or paying for commissions and reports are not doing so with their own money.

So, it’s not true because the parents didn’t report their children missing to the people who forcibly took them and you’re using that to discount their reality. Try listening to some residential school survivors instead of the voices in your head.