Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.
This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school.