Shaun Newman Podcast - #965 - Frances Widdowson & Tom Flanagan

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Part 1: Frances Widdowson joins us to discuss her recent arrest at the University of Victoria, the growing political backlash she faces for questioning the official narrative around the 215 “unmarked graves” at Kamloops, and why attempts to open evidence-based discussion on residential-school graves are being shut down on Canadian campuses.Part 2: Tom Flanagan joins the conversation as we examine the collective guilt being imposed on Canadians, the implications of the recent Cowichan Tribes court decision, and what these developments mean for free speech, historical truth, and the future direction of the country.Frances Widdowson is a Canadian political scientist and former associate professor at Mount Royal University who was fired in 2021 (a termination later ruled disproportionate by an arbitrator) after years of public criticism of Indigenous policy, the “Aboriginal industry,” and what she calls the “Grave Error” narrative surrounding the 2021 Kamloops unmarked-graves announcement. Co-author of the books Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry and Grave Error, she argues that many claims about residential-school mass graves lack forensic evidence and have been exaggerated for political and financial gain.Tom Flanagan is a Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Calgary; former advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Author of books on Métis history (e.g., The Diaries of Louis Riel, 1976) and libertarian policy critiques on aboriginal land claims. Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute; elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. Recently co-authored Dead Wrong on residential schools, sparking debate on unmarked graves.Tickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Tickets to the Mashspiel:https://www.showpass.com/mashspiel/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Prophet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail] the code “SNP” on all ordersGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Paredi.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Tuesday. How's everybody doing today? Well, before I get on to the episode sponsors today, I should point out, this is a two-part interview.

I had Francis on in the morning. and Tom coming on right after and so we just blended them together Francis stuck around for the second hour so I hope that's clear in when they kind of get blended together at the end of the first hour but we put them together

don't normally do that but today the conversation kind of led from one into the next so you can expect it's a two hour conversation but two parts the first part with just Francis the second part with Francis and Tom Flanagan But okay, how about we start here? Did you know it's Christmas season, folks?

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Willie McDonald, Evichipiac, Marty Up North, Toos, myself. It's going to be a fun day, and if you're interested in that, it's down the show notes. The other thing, Cornerstone Forum, March 28th at the Westing Calgary Airport. Yes, we're back, and early bird tickets. I probably can't say this enough. Early bird tickets are on until December 31st, then the price goes up. So if you're looking to attend, don't wait, buy today, get your tickets. And then also hit up the hotel booking link is on the website, ShowPass.

com backslash cornerstone 26 it's all down on the show notes as well and there's a complimentary ticket for the friday night social for anyone attending and purchasing a cornerstone ticket so that is going to be a fun day and march hope to see you there if you're listening or watching on spotify apple youtube rumble x facebook sub stack make sure to subscribe make sure to leave a review and if you're enjoying the show share with a friend all right let's get on to that tale of the tape First guest for today is a former associate professor at Mount Royal University and author. The second, a former professor at University of Calgary, former advisor to prime minister, Stephen Harper, and author. I'm talking about Francis Whittleson and Tom Flanagan.

So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Francis Whittison. And Francis, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me on your program. Well, I tell you what, it's been a while. I got to go back to, what is it, episode here, I had it right up. And then, of course, it disappears. Yeah, episode 390.

So people got to go way, way back. I was getting taxed you, you should have Francis on. This was probably a year ago. And I'm like, I had Francis on. But it's funny, you know, we're into the 960s now. So it's been, you've been a busy lady. And on this side, we have a. stopped talking to people either now francis like i mean every time i see something you're getting arrested

you're getting you know surrounded by people and um you're in the the heart of a giant i don't know is an argument discussion whatever you want to call it walk us through what's been going on here in the last uh i don't know it's been a couple years but certainly in the last couple months uh it's really hit a fever pitch yes i try so i was trying to go and give talk at universities that was last year and it worked in Ontario at Brock University and Wilfred Laurier and then with University of Regina that was the beginning of the cancellations like well Lathbridge of course was the first one but it anyway so you try to get a professor to book you talks and

then they cancel you and then it seems like okay well we've lost this battle. But then I discovered a way to get around that, which is to go in with the spectrum street epistemology, which is these mats. It's a method developed by Peter Bogosian, who you have seven mats from strongly agree to strongly disagree and neutral in the, and you have a claim. For example, the remains of 215 children have been confirmed at the the former Camloops Indian residential school. That's the claim. And you ask people how certain, do they strongly agree with that?

And if they say yes, they stand on the strongly agree mat and you say, what evidence do you have to support that view? And then what evidence would you need to become less certain? So you don't need to book any space. You just go in to do this method. And you can do it anywhere. You can do it outside is the best because then you don't, not using their internal. facilities and so on and you're just there as an ordinary citizen having a discussion academic discussion so now the universities can't have that so they're first

of all they issued trespass notices and then I would disobey I would just say I'm not going I'm going to stay here and do this and you do what you ever you have to do and so then the universities kind of stood back and and didn't know what to do about that so they let it happen and then there was a great discussion that would happen and then you vic they finally pulled out the enough of that and they arrested me i said i'm not going i they gave me the trespass notice said i'm not going they arrested me so now i'm going to go in and just keep on doing it and see which universities are going to do what in terms of this response response to this so eyes wide open you're like you know you knew you're going to get arrested

I didn't know. I didn't think they would. I really did not think they would arrest me because I thought there's no way this university is going to arrest me because now they're going to have to talk about their ridiculous propaganda that they have been pushing on students for the last four and a half years. And that's what's going to happen. And that they are a complete totalitarian environment and will not allow faculty members or students to oppose. the official line that they have taken, which is that 215 children are buried in the apple orchard at the Canloos Indian Residential School,

something which has no evidence for it, and is also a highly improbable situation because not one parent has said that their child went missing from the Canloos Indian Residential School. You know, in the videos I was watching, I watched a healthy dose of Winnipeg. And there was actually, at times you were you were having some discussion like oh this is interesting and then as soon as

that started like mayhem would break out and you're trying to have a conversation with somebody and they just full stop anytime any conversation began they got in the way to make sure it couldn't happen is that am i like am i um misinterpreting what went on in winnipeg or elsewhere for that matter winnipeg my cameraman was pushed off campus at daniel page who is a computer scientist he's a professor as well who's had terrible academic freedom problems he feared for his life that day because these gangsters it was a very manipulative situation by a bunch of female activists who i will call cry bullies unbelievable cry bullies who assault you pour drinks over your head taunt you endlessly and then claim they're the victims this is what they're doing and they're doing and they

bring their gangster friends with them. And so if any man tries to help you as they're assaulting you, they will scream, they will do their cry bully thing and the gangsters will come and start to attack the men who are trying to help you. And that's what happened at the University of Winnipeg. We have three and a half hours of footage from that day, which is absolutely shocking. and APTN just did a program where we got new shots of the horrible assault that I had to endure, which I just took it. I just completely took it. I'm lucky I didn't get kicked in the head because I lay down and told them I was going to take a nap

while they calm down. Like I was being, I was kind of, I wasn't really taking the situation very seriously, but I could have gotten seriously hurt, obviously. But nothing happened to me. I got a sticky drink poured on my head, but I just told them I thought they were deranged. I'm going to just wait until you guys calm down, and then we'll do the Spectrum Street Epistemology. And then eventually they had to go pick their kids up from daycare, so they all left with their gangster friends. And we did the street epistemology session.

But then after we did it, my sound system got water poured on it, and then Daniel got punched in the face. So it wasn't over even after we were able to withstand this unbelievable assault for, you know, over three hours. And the police were called by six different people and they never showed up. You know, if I go back to our first conversation, we were talking about Lethbridge back then. And I look at you and I go, you're no stranger to having people opposed to the views you're trying to talk about. about the things you're trying to talk about. But maybe just, I'm adding this up wrong, but to me it looks like it's escalated from then, right?

It was before it was like, I don't know if you can call it a peaceful crowd, but the videos I watched a Lethbridge, and you can certainly add in anything I'm missing. At the time, you know, there was no drinks being poured over your head. There was no like huddle around you, swatting cameras away, getting right in your face, calling you well I don't know a lot and now it just seemed and to the point of being arrested like I mean it just seems like there's this escalation happening on Canadian campuses right now well at the University of Lathbridge there was a little bit of jostling security was alarmed because of the number of people one indigenous woman and she was actually

authentic the other ones were just performative but she was she was screaming at me telling me that she hated me because I stole her land but I don't see if people scream at me or call me names I don't not care at all because I see it as a tactic that they're just they're just avoiding the actual merits of the discussion but because that's not working against me it won't it won't stop me in fact it makes me more determined to go in there and to just fight this now there's violence that is starting to be put out that happened at victoria too there was assaults and my my boards got stolen and and and the police were there well they arrested me immediately i wasn't there i gave my boards to jim mcmurgery and then this guy logan stats

came and tore them up like a wild animal um it was absolutely deranged and the police they tried to get the boards back and two protesters told the police where do you think you're going and don't don't advance any further to the police officer is trying to get my boards back so the police are totally do not have control over this situation and it's going to get worse people have got to take this very very seriously we are heading down a totalitarian path, and if you don't allow people to discuss things, violence is going to be what happens. Like discussion is what stops people from becoming violent, and because they're stopping the discussion, violence is what is going to be the result of what is going on. And this is

just totally unacceptable. And these universities are just absolute propaganda factories, and they They need to stop doing what they're doing. But because the whole system is breaking down, you know, it's hard to get it to write the ship. Well, the start of the University of Winnipeg, the three plus hours of it. It's protesters video showing up and what they're talking about you. They don't know your name or anything. Like they're just, they're showing up because you deny residential schools that existed. That's one of the first things I wrote down.

like, I don't think I've ever heard you say that, but maybe you could clear their air on this, actually what you're trying to discuss, because there's this, this, I don't know, I, anyone who's listened to you talk, because that's how I'm talking about, but maybe you could address that. Well, the claim that I am denying, if we're going to use the word denying, is that the remains of 215 children have been found in the apple orchard or orchard at Canloops. That's the claim now that I am denying. The other thing that I'm denying is that the residential schools were genocidal.

That's the second claim. The two are related because the claim about the 215 remains being confirmed, which the Camloos Indian Band announced in May 2021, was used to get the public to think that maybe there is something to this genocide kind of claim. because before we had the Canloops' quote unquote discovery, we had the Truth and Reconciliation's argument about cultural genocide, which is not genocide. Cultural genocide is assimilation, and you might be opposed to that and think that was a wrong-headed policy. But at the time, we didn't think that cultural genocide was actual genocide, which was the intent to destroy a group through. physical, like it's physical destruction.

And cultural genocide was never included within the UN definition of genocide. So this is a debate, like we just kind of missed that discussion about whether cultural genocide was genocide because everyone now is just kind of accepted the fact that 215 children were supposedly murdered and put in clandestine graves at Kamloops. without having any evidence for that. And I'm trying to get people to understand that that was a deception that was perpetrated against the Canadian public by the Aboriginal industry, which is this group of lawyers and consultants and neo-tribal elites who are making money off of all these kinds of grievances

that they are stoking, which they did in this case. Well, if we go to Here's a couple things The other thing I was going to say That I had written down right at the start of that video Is they wanted a bill in Manitoba To create a bill against or for hate speech against First Nations I'm probably saying that backwards

And I'm like that that's a scary thought too To not because you know like I'm a firm believer in open dialogue Open discussion let's discuss these ideas Right if Francis is as crazy as they say are then I think it'll probably come out. And if she isn't, then there's probably a few merits to what she's talking about.

But they're talking about creating a bill for hate speech. And I mean, this is, once again, this goes to the federal government and everywhere, talking about these online censorship bills and trying to get rid of dialogue. Yes.

And this is the bill. So it's Leah Gazan, who's a Winnipeg MP. She has been trying to do this for a number of years. She didn't get the last one she tried, just died because of the election, and now she's at it again. And this is to make what is called residential school denialism, which no one, well, they say it's about distorting facts and impeding reconciliation through this distortion of facts. But they're the ones who are distorting facts.

Leah Gazan said in January 2025 that bodies of children had been found at the Camusinian Residential School, 215 bodies. So they're accusing people of doing what they're actually doing, and then they want to have the correct, the actual, the factually accurate position criminalized because of their political view that you should agree with everything that. what's called a survivor says happen and of course the language survivor should not be accepted at all by people it's using genocide survivor language so we're being trapped because we're being given all this language which is not accurate and once you accept this language you're you're kind of stuck in this assumption george orwell alerted us to this you know 70 years ago this is a problem the politics of the english language where there's distorted words that you're given and then you use them and then you've lost the the argument before you start because your words are not correct camlips 215 what are what are the what are the things you're trying to bring up to people about camlips you point to it over and over in the the video they're yelling at you that they're not in camelips winnipeg why are you coming to

camloops you're like because it all starts with camloops and you're trying to explain what are you trying to get across about camloops i'm trying to get across that there's no evidence for the claim that 215 children are buried in the apple orchard that that's my main point but you know my specific point and and this is that camloops is a is the is the main card in the house of cards And so people are fighting hard to maintain this deception, because if they let that go and people realize what's happened over the last four and a half years, they're going to start questioning a whole bunch of other claims that have been being made. So that's kind of the specific claim. But the more general claim is at universities, it's very important to base your beliefs on reason, logic, and evidence. And this is what we used to work on at universities.

And this is completely gone. It's over because universities are now propagandistic institutions that are insisting people accept the views of these activists. And that's the more alarming kind of thing that's happened. Like the Camus case seems like a minor thing, but it actually is a, is a major thing because if we if we can't have the truth about camloops we can't pursue the truth about anything at the university like that that's kind of the situation when you first heard about uh camloops and you started looking into it what is it what did the evidence tell you or

like what did it show so interestingly i organized an event on july 10 10th, 2021. So that was about a month and a half after the cat. And this was before Sarah Bolier gave her presentation on July 15th. So I was the first person to raise the alarm publicly about this situation. And I organized an event with Rodney Clifton, Brian and Brian Guisbrecht with Paul Vim, and that's a professor from the University of Lathbridge as the moderator. Rodney Clifton is a professor emeritus from the University of Manitoba. Brian Giesbrecht is a judge who's been involved with Aboriginal policy for decades. Anyway, I was, I've been, I've been sort of seeing deception happening with respect to the residential schools.

I've been studying it for a number of years, so when I heard what had happened at Camloops, I was very cautious about what actually that was. And Brian Giesbrecht was saying on this event, there's a whole bunch of abandoned cemeteries across the country, so it's positive. so it's possible that Kamloops is an abandoned cemetery. So that was the first thing. Is it an abandoned cemetery or is it clandestine burials? But then we found out that there is no, that wasn't a cemetery,

there is actually a cemetery across from the Catholic Church on the Kamloops Reserve, on the Kamloops Indian Band Reserve. So any bodies that are buried legitimately would be buried on the Kamloops Indian Bands Reserve. reserve. So that was kind of the whole situation. But immediately when we started to talk about this, we got castigated by Sean Carleton, who is a professor from the University of Manitoba and Daniel Heath Justice, who is a professor from the University of British Columbia, they came out swinging, accused us of residential school denialism and all sorts of just ad hominem comments. At the time I was being

mobbed by my colleagues at Mount Royal University and a number of colleagues were fomenting this ostracism of me and that resulted in me being fired in December 2021. So there's a lot of things happening and Kamloops is this whole thing about Kamloves is one of the reasons why I can't be reinstated, says the arbitrator because people like Gabriel Weaselhead, who is a A person I was fired and she was brought back in because she felt unsafe by the views that I was stating at Mount Royal. She feels unsafe and it causes friction if I discuss the Camloose case. Therefore, I cannot be reinstated at Mount Royal University. That's the argument that the arbitrator has accepted for my case at Mount Royal.

So this is unbelievably serious. We are facing the destruction of tenure at universities and no, very few professors seem to care about it. And my treacherous union, who went after, who was the one who got responsible for me largely getting fired, it's totally captured by these activists. So if Daniel Smith is listening to this podcast, we need a public. inquiry about universities in Alberta to get to the bottom of the ideological capture of the whole system and the can lose cases away into that because it's so obvious that this is just a factual claim. I'm not trying to make some complex political argument here.

I'm just saying universities should value facts and the pursuit of truth. We used to agree about that and now we don't anymore because people like gabriel weasel head get very upset when you challenge their false ideas that that's what's going on so then i want to go back camloops in one second but just so i the the claim is i feel unsafe or uncomfortable if francis is at the university couldn't you put in the same claim i feel unsafe having her at the maybe we both should be God. I just feel unsafe with someone else having ideas. Well, the problem is that it's not deployed equally. So we care about whether Gabriel Weaselhead feels unsafe, but we don't care whether you would feel unsafe. Like Gabriel Weaselhead is a prized indigenization

asset. Everyone listens to her and worries about how she's feeling, you know, what, what can we do to to make her feel that she is included and in order to make her feel that she's included we have to exclude everyone else from the university the same goes on with trans activism that's the other file that i've been involved with because the trans activists feel unsafe when i say that there are only two sexes that's my claim with respect to the trans issue. And because it makes Mary Lee Mulholland upset, I can't be reinstated, you know, this kind of thing. When like this claim about there being more than two sexes and so on, this is causing unbelievable carnage to children because they're getting their body parts

chopped off, getting cross-sex hormones. Their whole lives are going to be destroyed because they have a mental illness and believe that they're the opposite sex. That's the reality. I couldn't say that. When I was at Mount Royal, I could not, I would never raise the issue of mental illness about the trans issue because I knew I would just be absolutely destroyed. But that is the truth. And instead of dealing with the mental illnesses of people, we are pretending that their mental

illnesses are reality. This doesn't work. On the two sexes thing, I don't know if I can speak for majority of people because maybe I'm just wrong in that and I should just, but I feel like a healthy dose of society knows there's only two sexes and they think the rest of it is just kooky and want to protect children. It's why, in my opinion, it's why Daniel Smith comes out, uses the notwithstanding act. It's why these things are happening.

Why she gets applauded for it? And the activist side of it, they're going to scream no matter. I mean, they get everything they want. They still scream for more. So, you know, like to me, that one, although it's still playing out in society, I feel like most of society, it's almost become a running joke, the two sexist thing. We're still seeing it propagate and pop up in different places. But I think most people are like, that makes no sense, right? Like, I mean, just look at, I don't know, I come from the farm, friends.

And the old joke, you know, right. Just look at the animals. It's like, come on. Like, let's, let's just, let's get the old wheels run into here. This is, we're, we're in a strange territory. And it was before 2025 when that was all at its height. But I feel like, you know, Donald Trump coming in and people can hate Donald Trump. But lots of people on the left are like, yeah, that actually makes sense. Like, you know, like the, you know, men competing against women in sports and seeing that play out has been. um carnage right like it's just been awful to watch and you know and it just goes on and on and so i feel like that's hit a ridiculous peak where most of society just agrees with using the not with standing clause and and there's certain activists or certain things that have been used against daniel smith here in canada to try and make her look poorly on it but if you talk to the general public just like you know that makes sense let's just carry on with their day we don't need these things in school. We don't need all this, you know, the chopping off of body parts. We don't need, we, we need parents to be involved. If I come back to Camelps, if I come back to

the First Nations, though, but just to interrupt you on the trans issue, the universities, there's still a huge problem with this issue in the universities. My wonderful colleague Sinclair McCrae, a philosopher at Mount Royal University, he has been trying to pursue this issue, especially about the sports, the issue of having men who believe that their women compete in women's sports, the whole university that's vocal is against his position. And I hope he does not get mobbed the same way that I got mobbed. This is very dangerous for truth-seeking professors in universities right now. And I do not know why the Alberta government is not taking more of a

role. I can be I can take street epistemology into all those universities and discuss these claims. I just need some help from the Alberta government to be able to do it. You know, this is the this is the situation now. We need the universities to be true seeking institutions and on a number of issues they are not. They are completely captured and the trans issue is still a huge problem in universities. And once again, I guess I don't have children in university. I'm not in university. So I just don't, I don't see that realm, I guess, Francis, right?

So I take what you're saying very seriously because I just, I'm like, I'm not in those realms. You know, so I don't, you know, I see the everyday Albertan. And it's just, I don't know, not a dead issue, but pretty much dead issue. It like I don't mean it they that isn't still going on just in their lives. They're like that this is silliness like what are we doing but but it's a wider issue too like like it like although it's the we have the trip that the order's only two sexes and the remains of two 215 children have not been confirmed at canlips those are two claims that you cannot discuss at the university so but those that's true this the fact that you cannot discuss them at the university. is an indication of a much larger problem with the university. Yes, I would agree. And that's what has to be addressed by the government.

And the government is reluctant to enter into this. But all it has to do is just start a public inquiry on this or, you know, give me some assistance in my attempts to restore the universities to become academic spaces. You know, this, this, this has to happen if we want the universities to, to exist as academic institutions, which, you know, not that long ago, 10 years ago, although they were never perfect, they were functioning. Like, like, you, I was able to thrive in the university system up until about, you know, 2019. And that's when I all started to fall apart. I'm, uh, you have to forgive me. government intervention unnerves me so when you're saying when you're saying you need the government

to to do something with the universities yeah what can they do that you're like would make sense you're talking about an inquiry but like what would that accomplish like what do you what government involvement in universities are you talking specifically about uh well there's two possibilities. One is to have a public inquiry, which will, because it's not just there's Lethbridge and Mount Royal University, those two things. Get those presidents and different people up giving testimony. You need to get, you need to force these people to say what they think is the case in a, in a court like setting or something where they're forced. to say things, because what they do is they just hide behind a wall of, of, of, of, you know,

bureaucratic and legal kinds of things. Yeah, they just don't talk. Yeah, we're still trying to get things to go with University of Lathbridge. That was 2003. We haven't gone to court yet on this. It's going to be three years and it's probably going to be longer. And then there's going to be all sorts of legal obstacles. If you have a public inquiry, you can have much.

more openness and we can look at the cases of University of Calgary. There's been terrible things that have happened there. University of Alberta, there's been terrible things that have happened there. So let's have a look at what's gone on, plus the Mount Royal case, which is mired in, you know, obfuscation of the whole labor relations regime, which I've been, I've been gone through an unbelievably abusive process for the last five years. And it's never going to end because I will not give one thousandths of one inch on what's happened and what how people the administration and the union um colluded to have me removed from Mount Royal like that's what happened because they all favor the the woke activists and and so on and and that's never probably

going to come out in the arbitration process because it's all controlled by the union so and the administration so it's like it's an incredibly abusive and if you have a public inquiry you can have much more openness as to what you're looking at and they can have access to all my documents they can just look take a look at those things and then the other possibility because i know that's going to be a very cumbersome process is, you know, create some kind of consultancy role or whatever to bring in the Spectrum Street Epistemology to all the universities in Alberta. Like, I don't know why you can do that, but you could, like they have advisors of various kinds. Make me the advisor to restore critical

thinking and open inquiry at universities. You know, I can do it. I can touch base with all the presidents of the universities and say, we want to do this event of grit. We want to get the different sides of this issue. Everyone's going to be invited. And we can talk about the evidence that exists. Help out my poor colleague, Sinclair McCrae,

who is fighting a massive battle to discuss women in men who believe that they're women, in women's sports. This is one of the things he's looking at. And he's getting no support from his call. Well, there's people who support him, but they're reluctant, they're obviously reluctant to come forward publicly. Because they're going to get serious pushback

from these ideologically driven trans activists. Yeah, well, as I sit here and I'm like, you know, it's settled. and I know that's a stupid thing to say. But I'm just, you know, I guess the political climate for the trans, the men, women, that conversation has changed. But as I say that, here in Alberta, we just had the pastor arrested for not issuing an apology. And I'm like, oh, man. So, you know, like, I'm almost putting my foot in my mouth as I say that because obviously it isn't settled.

I just look at, you know, here in Canada. the the whole men-women issue I feel like and maybe I'm wrong on this I got to be very clear I have no no ear of anyone and just my own thoughts Francis is sporting and I go to set up a national or sorry a public inquiry on that I think the the there is a growing sentiment for that on that specific issue I could see that and I could see like let's open up some discussion on this I could see that but if I come all the way back to Camelps The reason I was trying to walk through all the things, you know, when you start looking at it is because the First Nations, the Indian Act, reconciliation, I mean, you got the Emmonson Oilers, not the only team before every game. They have a land acknowledgement. And I point to them because I'm a hockey player. And I love the game of hockey. And I watch what's going on, not only there, but in every aspect of society where it just is coming. more and more and more and more and that one is almost like it is settled we're moving on

francis you're a thorner aside we want you nowhere near us and we're going to send mobs the cops don't show up because they're like now it's that francis widowson again and once again i'm not talking to cops folks i'm just like i'm watching it from afar i guess and on the specific issue of camlobs that one is it's like it's been settled and we've moved on we're not going to talk about this anymore and yet obviously there's some problems there you keep pointing them out yes and we must have truth about can loops if we can't have truth about canloups then the whole process of evidence based reasoning is is being is being destroyed and and this this is it's the as i repeat myself again it seems like a minor issue but when have we said before

it's okay for people to lie to people that that's okay we're okay with that lying with to people is fine i i don't think people think that like it's like no lying to people is not okay so stop lying to people about cam loops like that's you know and this is you vic is lying to people about cam loops what is you vic i don't know if they specifically what is you vic sorry what is you vick said specifically so they uh so they've been doing this uh for four and a half years uh well they they have a president whose name is she's acting but she's not actually she didn't start at all it was a guy by the name of kevin hall anyway he said initially a mass grave was found at camloops so that's what he said they had uh sacred fire burned for four days

about the bodies of children that were found at Canloops. They got some banners printed up of 215 plus banners, which they put up all around campus. In September 2024, they claimed that because the banners were getting a bit weathered, the 215 plus ban, like with the 215 plus numbers on them, They were going to take them down and replace them with Aboriginal artwork. Now, perhaps they did that because they realized that this claim was no longer true, and they wanted to just kind of, you know, but they never, they just continued to pretend that this was a valid thing.

And they said this on their website, the 215 graves found at Camloops in September, 24. And then they now have the survivors flag that they've raised. And then at this, this route, so this thing that happened at UVIC on December 2nd, they had this, all these professors got together and invited their activist friends, all dressed up in orange shirts and whatnot. And then they had this woman giving a talk. She's a poet laureate who said the 215 children who were buried. at Camlet like she made the speech with that being part of her speech and then they

removed me I was not allowed to be there with my billboard saying what remains 215 like like let's talk about this let's talk about the evidence it was just a question like are there were the remains of 215 children at Camelots what's your evidence for that and they would not allow that question to be asked and and the other thing too was someone got up a young person and tried to say, hey, you know, shouldn't we have a marketplace of ideas that we're discussing? And she was just quickly escorted away by open-taxas.

As soon as they saw, because they allowed her to speak for about 30 seconds, and as soon as she started to just say, isn't it a marketplace of idea, you could see about three of them go, oh, this is the wrong person. Uh-oh, no, we don't have that. So, you know, that's kind of where we're at here. Like that, people watching that at a university, you've got all these people with orange shirts and this frenzy of drumming and, you know, and then you got someone who's saying, hey, why don't we just kind of look at some other ideas about this or let's have some discussions? Oh, no, we can't have that. Like that, that was in a nutshell what is going on. And are we okay with that? Is that okay to have universities that are propaganda factors?

and not places where you're trying to figure out what's true or false. Well, it's supposed to be a place of open discussion, learning, of questioning pretty much everything, right? Like, I mean, you're supposed to be able to ask whatever you want. Yes. It's a very fundamental part of going to university is that you're going to be, you know, pushing on your critical thinking. You're supposed to write on what you believe in and then, you know, discuss it, debate it, all these things. And when you come back to, you know, like, you think of what Charlie Kirk was doing, going around all the university campuses in the United States. Yeah.

And but I'm not even doing what Charlie Kirk is doing. I'm, I'm just trying to ask people, like, that's my, well, that's why Spectrum Street epistemology is so beautiful. Is it's not about I'm right and you're wrong, that kind of setup. It's about, okay, you have this claim, let's figure out the evidence for that and how confident you are about it. And after you've had this discussion, are you going to be more confident about it? Are you going to be less confident about it? Or are you going to stay the same? So it's like gradations of certainty, which is how we, like, you should never be 100% certain about anything.

I'm not I'm not a hundred percent certain about the Canloops case. I think it's highly improbable that there's remains buried there, but it's possible. Like, like, there's no evidence that we have. So that's kind of the key is, is that you have degrees of certainty and your degrees of certainty are based on evidence. And when you're presented with new evidence, you should change your view someone. Like, that's how you should work in an academic context. But that is not how things are occurring in the universities. And I know it's bad, I've been watching it deteriorate for the last 30 years.

And the funny thing is, I have my master's degree from the University of Victoria. I received a master's degree in political science in 1992. So I was there for five years. you Vic. I got my bachelor's degree there as well. So I saw you, Vic, in its glory days, wonderful professors, a little bit of wokeism still was around the edges. Like there's a few kind of postmodernist, you know, there is no truth kind of arguments going on, but it was just sort of seen as an interesting kind of thought that you could entertain. And I was I was never, ever told I should not say that or we could not discuss that or that never happened.

And in fact, it was the opposite. You know, I had a professor. I remember him, his name is Warren Magnuson. We kind of fell out, unfortunately, because he became a little bit woke. But at the time, he was a very, very critical, critically thinking socialist. And he said, I challenge every student to take on my views. I suspect you don't accept my ideas because, of course, most students are not, at that time, would not have been socialists. And we would just tell the professors what they wanted to hear to get good marks, right?

like that's kind of a bit of the strategy if you're if you're a bit and he said don't do that take me on like I want you to take on my views if you you know he was actively encouraging people to do that I remember that very very clearly and now like you're never going to get that that's never going to happen oh Sinclair McCray does it my wonderful colleague Sinclair McCray who I cannot praise enough like The Alberta government should get him to be one of their consultants, to help with Mount Royal University, to restore Mount Royal University to its wonderful status. When I arrived there in 2008, he was a wonderful institution. We had Robin Fisher as the provost and Manuel Merton as the dean.

They protected me. They seriously protected me. And I could have been taken out much earlier. But they stood up and they said, no, we're an academic institution. And although Francis Whittleson has controversial views, that's what universities are all about. And they told people in no uncertain terms, that's what's going to happen. Look at the change as to what's happened in the administration. You have, you know, presidents openly, like not openly, secretly kind of collaborating with, you know, activist students and so on.

this is what you get out of the when you look when you look at universities as a whole and you go this is when it started to change and this is how it got there yeah where do you point to because you you're saying in 2008 if you weren't protected you would have been out well before when you did so what is it that started to happen is it just this kind of overtime a decade after decade just kind of slow transition or is there something you point to specifically you're like that's when it started to happen and this is the things that started to you know spawn out of it so i know specifically when i realized we were in trouble which was the um the fall of 2014 um and that was when kathy shaler the provost at the time who was new provost so took over from robin fisher

she was absolutely horrible and an activist through and through told arts faculty council that we would be indigenizing Mount Royal University. And I was listening to this going, what is that, what does that mean? That does not sound like that is an academic stance. And then in December 2014, I was at a workshop, beware of the word workshop,

put on by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which was the organization created to protect academic freedom. And it was holding this equity workshop, and telling people that they should be putting territorial land acknowledgements on their syllabus. And I thought, what on earth is the Canadian Association of University Teachers doing? Why wouldn't this wonderful organization that is there to protect academic freedom, why would it be actually advocating something which is a threat to academic freedom?

And when I first, when I was participating these two things, I was going, this is not, this seems very odd, but I didn't realize the extent of what was going to come. But just to give a wider historical lens on it, although it became apparent in 2014, this problem has been unfolding since the 1960s. So it started in the 1960s with postmodernism, which is the idea that there is no objective truth. The truth is the subjective beliefs of groups that perceive themselves to be oppressed, like that kind of idea. And that got put in place in black studies, women's studies, queer studies, disability studies, etc.

They're not academic programs, they're activist programs. And they were marginal for many years, and then starting in the 2000s, they began to take over the machinery of the institution through equity, diversity, and inclusion offices. That's when you started to see those offices begin to take root. That's when the administration became captured by these programs. And so now we have those activists running the institution. In Canada, they took over the unions. So for me, that's been a massive problem, is that my union, which is fighting my case, it got taken over by the activists.

And so now I've got to rely on this activist entity to defend my job. And they didn't do a very good job. it let's just put it that way because they wanted me to lose they wanted me to lose and they they set out to create a case that is so weak that it's not going to it's not going to win so that's what they do and it's just it's just so heartbreaking that this has happened but i'm still in the game i'm still my case is being appealed to the labor relations board it was supposed to go on December 3rd, and then it got postponed because of the, you know, some kind of medical emergency. And now it's going again on February 6th. So we're appealing my lack of reinstatement

to the Alberta Labor Relations Board, but the whole system is so badly corroded, it's unlikely to succeed. But if we get the public inquiry, or like the division of the government helping Sinclair McCrae and myself and all the academics who want to have an academic university. We need the government's help. We really seriously need it. And I know that's a difficult pill to swallow because it should be academics who are deciding what happens in universities, not the government. But the activists have taken over the universities.

So we don't have academics that are in charge anymore. And that's the problem. does the peterson bill help you at all this is for professional bodies uh no because uh we're we're not we're not professional associations where we're different we're a different kind of set so this is something different than oh yeah like like we're not we that's not we're not supposed to be governed like professional associations where we're supposed to be academically run institutions that are not, you know, our, the thing that governs us is our academic expertise. That's how we're supposed to function.

But because everything has been so badly captured, we don't have that happening anymore. Especially in the humanities. The humanities, like the sciences are not as bad, but they're still bad, like the biology department. It's like, that's why the trans thing is taken root just because the biologists are, you know, not, not functioning properly in this debate. Like, biologists know there's only two sexes. They do. Like, this is what they study. Like, but they're, they're not standing up because, you know, they're going, oh.

A few are. Richard Dawkins finally has started to do stuff. Jerry Coyne, another great guy, Luongo, sorry, she's from Brazil, I believe. Maria Luongo, she writes with Jerry Coyne. I met her in Stanford. Of course, Colin Wright, who got pushed out because of his stance on, there's only two sexes. He got his career was destroyed.

So it's like, what? A biologist has their career destroyed? because they're arguing that there's only two sackses. Where is it in your mind, if let's say Francis decided, you know what, I'm going to go, I don't care where your spot is.

I don't know if it's Mexico or Hawaii or south of France. Take your pick. It doesn't matter. Let's just say you rode off in the sunset. And you just said, you know what? I'm just tired of this. I don't feel like getting mobbed every second day.

And you just decided, this is going to go wherever it's going to go. In your mind, where does this go if it isn't stopped? Fascism. Fascism is on the horizon. And people should study what Nazi Germany was like before fascism took hold. And the first thing that got it was freedom of speech. And interesting Germany is a really good example because, like, people often compare it to Mao.

China and Russia, you know, what happened in the Soviet Union, those aren't really very good comparisons because the university system was not well established in those places. Germany had the most advanced university system in the world and it got taken over by the Nazis and they pushed out all the academics. Like they took over the institution and turned it into a propaganda arm of the Nazi party. And that's where we're going. And I'm, I'm incredibly concerned about what's happening. And I don't, and everyone seems to be asleep, you know, about it. And I'm saying, we have to fight now. We are not being disappeared. We are not being put in, well, I was, I was not

put in jail. I was taken into an interview room and given a tick. it for $115 just for being on a campus trying to discuss this claim about Camloops. But the fact they arrested me is a new, this is a new thing. And, you know, I'm not, I'm going into three other universities in Vancouver in January. University of Fraser Valley, Simon Fraser University and UBC, because they're all complicit in the Canloops, you know, deception. University of Fraser Valley has Sarah Bollier, who was the GPR operator, who is just a complete activist who got was used by the band or maybe she was in on it. I don't know what,

but she doesn't know what she's doing and she somehow gave the people the impression that children as young as three years old were buried in the apple orchard or maybe the band was, I don't know what happened there, but I want to go and expose Sarah Bollier, the University of Fraser Valley. Simon Fraser University, the archaeology department is under a gag order from the Canloups Indian Band. How can that happen? Publicly funded institution that should be a safeguard against these false claims is actually participating in their continuation. And then we have the wonderful University of British Columbia with the First Nations House of Learning, Jo Ali Viveros, who's the head of that, actively perpetuating falsehoods.

And Andrew Martindale, who is supposedly an archaeologist who's been doing the GPR deception in Cooper Island and claiming that GPR finds, well, Jolie Viveros is saying that that was on the UBC website, is that GPR detects human remains this is not true GPR is what the geoscience expert

I've been interacting with says is a thing finder that's what a GPR machine is a thing for you have things that are there and you don't know what those things are you have to dig you have to excavate

to find out which comes which comes back to the camloops thing with the 215 which I believe they've already corrected to two, didn't, didn't the new number become 2.14? Or is it less than that? Anyways, it doesn't matter. The thing is, they found anomalies, but they've never dug.

And then the proponents of, of, you can't disturb that land. This is sacred. Come in and go, you can't disturb it. So it's just, we're not going to go find out. But they've never dug to see what's actually there. And if you were going to actually find human remains, you should probably dig it up. and you should probably find out what the anomalies are so everybody could know exactly and they received 12.1 million dollars they applied for this funding in according to black locks documents

i have 283 pages of redacted emails that were obtained by blacklocks of freedom of information they applied for 9.3 million dollars for excavations that's on the application form they got 12.1 million dollars and from the various putting through you know piecing through all the documents it appears that they got three point around three point two million dollars between 2021 and 2023 to do the forensics and the DNA analysis on but of course in order to find out whether you've got to do DNA or forensics you got to dig you've got to excavate to find the remains, whether there's remains there or not. But they took that money. They haven't done it. That money has to be spent on the excavations. And they said in January

2022, sorry, 2022, there was a fifth estate supposed investigative documentary on the Canlou's case and Manny Jules and Ted Godfretzen Jr. said that the 13 family heads had met and had decided to quote unquote exume the bodies so the children could be sent home. Now, of course, in order to exhume the bodies and send the children home, you have to find out whether there are bodies and children there. But they were going to do that. They said they were going to do that. And now because they sense that this is not valid, this view, they're trying to back away from it. And they shouldn't be allowed to do that. It's not even a question of money. It's a question of deceiving the entire Canadian public. I don't know how many people when they

heard this announcement believe that there were these children buried there. I was, I was taking a distance general we could probably say a high proportion of Canadian high proportion right and look at the hysteria there's people crying there was memorials all over the country

there was flags flowing a half mass there was church is burned you know yeah church is burned if you're watching that you're going to say well why how could this how could all these people be saying this if it weren't true like that

that's what they were saying so you know the whole thing needs a massive you know truth telling kind process like we need a truth and reconciliation process on the false claim that was stated in in uh 2021 in fairness though if they went and exhumed it and found 200 and some bodies francis would be sitting there going oh well there they are yeah so and then we can go to get to work on finding out who was responsible who those children were who was responsible for putting these children in a in clandestine graves like who are the perpetrators all the things that need to

happen to hold people to account for the terrible crime that must have taken place for there to be and i should say too you mentioned the 200 that's important to bring up to in on july 15th 2021 Sarah bollier the gpr operator from the university of fraser valley she did a presentation and she said that there were not 215, it had to be downgraded to 200 targets of interest because she had gotten word from, I presume, the archaeology department at Simon Fraser, that 15 of those 215 targets of interest had been previously excavated by the Simon Fraser University archaeology department and they had not found any remains when they were excavating that area. So that raises the question. If 15 of those two 15 were false positives, why wouldn't the

other 200 also be false positives? Likely the septic tiles that were buried in that location in the 1920s. Well, welcome to part two. I'm now joined by Francis Wooderson, Tom Flanagan. Tom, thanks for hopping on and joining us. Tom, I'm going to start with you before we continue today's discussion. Just first time on the podcast, maybe you could give the audience a little bit of who they're listening to. Well, I'm a retired professor of political science.

at the University of Calgary. I taught there for, I think, 55 years. I published a number of books about indigenous issues, both Métis and Indian. And I also had a side career in politics. I was worked at various times for Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, and Francis Widdowson. Excuse me, not for France.

Daniel Smith, I'm getting my women mixed up here. Freudian slip. Freudian slip, yeah. Worked for, yeah. Maybe I'll get a chance to work for you, too, Francis, for Daniel Smith. So I became a campaign manager, not for Preston, but for the other two people. And so I was in and out of politics in the back rooms for about 15 or 20 years, which was a very interesting.

I'm getting rid of my cat here. He's a senior cat. He's somewhat has dementia. He likes to be near his people. Yeah, so anyway, I did have a career in the backrooms of politics, but that's all in the past. But I'm happy to say that here in Alberta, the mayor, Jeremy Farkas, is a former student of mine. The premier, Daniel Smith, is a former student. And the leader of the opposition, Nahedenshi is a former student.

So, you know, teaching at a university, you get people of all types. So I had cordial relations with all of them, some closer than others. Just on the provincial politics then for a second. With watching the Heiden Enchi be the leader of the opposition, Daniel Smith, obviously the premier of Alberta, those two interact and what is being said on both sides. Sitting in a classroom, Tom, you got to interact with these people when they're much younger. Seeing it play out now, do you have any thoughts? Well, it's interesting because they were debating partners and opponents back when they were students.

This was outside the classroom, but there was a debate club. And Danielle and Nahed were both active in the debate society. As far as being students, with Danielle, it was a small class, and I got to know her quite well. and she was a very good student, and I recommended her for an internship at the Fraser Institute. Nahed, I didn't get to know as well. He was in a large lecture, introduction to politics. I'd like to take credit for his achievements,

but I don't think he learned it from me. I think he had a natural gift for it. So I knew him, but he sat in the front row and obviously was interested, but you know because of the size of the class i didn't really get to know him well um bumped into him a couple of times later on i remember one time i was giving a lecture at harvard and and naid showed up in the lecture i didn't even recognize i mean he has teeth fixed it made him look quite different um good way to get started in politics make your appearance more presentable yeah so i can't claim to have known naid well uh you know just to say hello really daniel

although I did know quite well. Well, from here on, I don't feel free, Francis, to hop in any point. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Tom is you had an opinion piece in the National Post. Canada wasn't stolen from indigenous people. I thought maybe you could walk. I'm going to assume a bunch of people have read it, but at the same token, I assume there's a bunch of people that haven't read it. So maybe you could walk us through, you know, the piece and just parts of it, you know, like, you know, if you go far enough back, I guess would I kind of summarized it's like well what point do you want to start where the settling started and and we're

going to draw a line here but not back here maybe you could walk us through some some of your thoughts on your researcher or your opinions or your thoughts yeah yeah yeah first of all to clarify the titles of columns are always supplied by the the newspaper so they put on a catchy title but our article didn't actually deal with within if you want to argue about whether the land was stole or not Canada, you have to bring in treaties. And we hardly mentioned treaties in our article. So we were going into another branch of the argument, which has to do with settlers and colonization.

The article, I think, really started in Mark Milkey's mind as an attack against the term settler colonialism. And so he wanted to make the point that everybody's a settler. Homo sapiens didn't get to the Americas until quite a late date, maybe as late as 20,000 years ago, maybe 15, it's debated, and there have been waves of settlement, different, very different language groups among American Indians, and then the Inuit, and we don't know if some of these peoples survived and contribute to the gene. pool or whether they were exterminated.

I mean, for example, the earliest settlers, 20 to 15,000 years ago, probably came down along the Pacific coast and hopped. I mean, most of North America was covered by ice then. You couldn't settle in the interior until you got far south. So they probably hopped along the coast, and they got as far south. There's good evidence that they settled in Chile. although there's no human remains, but there's all kinds of other evidence of a, of a settlement, not an agricultural settlement, but a gathering kind of hunting gathering settlement in Monteverde in Chile. So we have no idea who these people were, what, you know, what race or language group, what happened to them, whether they were they absorbed by later waves or exterminated?

at what we don't know um so anyway there are all these waves of settlement and and europeans are the another wave reaching the new world about the same time as the last wave of native peoples got there the inuit reached um eastern arctic region including greenland about the same time as Columbus got to the Caribbean. The Vikings, in fact, were in Greenland before the Inuit. If you think of Greenland as a part of North America, Trump does, apparently. So, yeah, we try to make this historical point

that in a larger perspective, there are all kinds of waves of settlement and were a more recent one, but that doesn't mean that the earlier ones have special claims to make because in their day they displaced other populations. And there's good records of First Nations in Canada driving out other First Nations or exterminating them in recent times. Like the Urquil, we're building an empire in what's now on New York, Ontario, and the American Midwest at the time that French started to come up to St. Lawrence.

So we can't be too moralistic about this. There's a succession of peoples, and we're a recent one, but we're all here, and let's get on with the show. I mean, that's the basic tenor of our article. Well, I guess sitting here, it seems like we're trying to reconcile what we did in the last, you know like you look at the cowagin tribe decision in bc and i think if i go back to barry kirkham's uh points on it they have to prove ownership of the land before 1844 if my memory is is correct and we're very focused 1846 i think is and very yes we're very focused on making right the wrongs

in recent history and recent being 1846 right like and and trying to to usher in this, I don't know how to explain it, but I got two very smart, capable people here that maybe could break it down of what we're trying to do and what's so drastically wrong with this thought process. Yeah, I'll say something and then Francis probably wants to jump into. And here we come to the other branch of the argument that we didn't deal with in the National Post-Ardle, and that's treaties. Canada was Although assertions are sometimes made about conquest Canada wasn't really Taken over by conquest

There were treaties Recognizing the sovereignty of the Crown Everywhere from North Dakota Well the maritime provinces To through Alberta The Prairie provinces and by the treaties, First Nations surrendered their claim to ownership of the land.

They recognized the sovereignty of the crown, and in return, they accepted smaller pieces of land for their own use and benefit, which today we call reserves. That's what's called them at the time reserves, and various benefits from the crown, annual subsidies and certain guarantees. So it was a peaceful process. It was based on mutual agreement. Now, British Columbia is the big exception. There were a few treaties in British Columbia. The government of British Columbia, which was before it became part of Canada, operated on a principle of the extinguishment of Aboriginal title through adverse possession.

In other words, the representatives of the crown. First, it was the Hudson's Bay Company, and then it was a governor appointed by Britain. They operated on the principle that they had sovereignty and that they could allocate the land. And they did. And so they set up Indian reserves, and they also made grants of land to various settlers coming in. And you could say it was unilateral because it wasn't a treaty, but certainly there was consultation with the local native people. They asked them where they would like to, I could hold my cat. It makes me look like Dr. Evil in the movie.

But he gets upset if I'd ignore him for too long. So there was consultation, and they were asked where they would like to be. A lot of it revolved around fishing stations, certainly on the coast, and up some of the rivers far into the interior, actually. People lived by fishing mainly of salmon, and they had special places where they could catch them. And so they asked for those places to be given to them as reserves. So there was consultation. And, you know, everybody at the time recognized the sovereignty of the crown. Well, I won't say everybody.

Maybe there were dissidents. But by and large, people on both sides recognized the sovereignty of the crown. So now you fast forward to modern times. And since the 1960s, there's been a movement. in British Columbia to claim that Indians still have full ownership of the land. And some would even go further and say they have sovereignty, perhaps not fully understanding what that might mean. So this goes back to the eminent lawyer Tom Berger, who was the original litigator in the

1960s. There's a chain of cases. And then we get the government recognizing. Aboriginal rights in 1982 in Section 35 of the amendments to the Constitution, again, without understanding what they were doing, it was added at a late date to create a political coalition in support of the patriation. The text says that we recognize the existing Aboriginal rights. And then the courts come into it in a big way.

And here, I got to get rid of something which suddenly popped up on my screen. The courts get into it in a big way and start expanding the notion of existing Aboriginal rights. Basically, they start ignoring the word existing and creating new rights. And the most recent decisions, you know, you've probably had guests talking about them, the Richmond decision. which appears to nullify ordinary citizens' ownership of their houses in FeeCimple and a recent other decision. I mean, it's getting very, very complicated. But anyway, it's been a base, mostly a movement in the courts since the 1960s, but the politicians did enormous damage in 1982 when they adopted Section 35 without fully grasping what might be implied.

in that and that gave the courts additional momentum now they had something new to work with and yeah anyway why don't you let francis join in just before francis hops in section 35 could you just walk the audience through what they adopted well there are several several sub clauses in it but the main one for our purposes is just the statement at the beginning of the section that uh canada recognizes existing average treaty rights of the Indians, Métis, and Inuit. The word existing was added at the insistence of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed. He basically kind of wanted to freeze it. He said, okay, Canada historically has recognized treaty rights for sure and certain Aboriginal rights. And these are embedded in various statutes and legal decisions. Okay, so we recognize those, and we put them in the Constitution,

which means they can't easily be overturned, would require a constitutional amendment to rescind what's been done in the past. But the word existing was supposed to be a safeguard against the creation of future rights by the court, at a constitutional level. Future rights could be created by Parliament, but they wouldn't be part of the Constitution. But the word existing has been ignored by the courts. And they have amplified the notion of Aboriginal rights

to include Aboriginal title, ownership of outright ownership of the land, which you get. And again, the main decisions have been in British Columbia because of the absence of formal treaties in most of the process. province. So it's easier there to argue that Aboriginal title is still existing. You can make an argument in some other parts of Canada, too, in Quebec or in New Brunswick, based on the wording of 18th century treaties, which recognize the sovereignty of the crown, but they don't explicitly deal with land. But it can be argued that it's implied. because in the British system, the sovereign is the underlying owner of all land, your land, my land, Francis's land.

The crown has underlying title to everybody's land and can withdraw private ownership if it chooses, although the compensation is required because of acts of legislatures. anyway I'm not quite sure what the question was no no no you're just adding in context that's what I want Francis feel free yeah so I think that's great what Tom has done because Tom has much more expertise on these legal questions than I do

but I think there's some serious conceptualization problems and everything that has happened And since the 1960s, because of course the 1960s was the break that we had, because we had originally in 1969, the idea that we had to sort of get rid of the outdated kinds of interactions that were sort of seeing Aboriginal people as words of the state and so on. and there should be assistance to enable Aboriginal people to become Canadian citizens just like everyone else. So that was kind of the plan up until 69. And then after 1969, that got rejected.

And everyone was very concerned. Well, it seemed to be the climate was, we need Aboriginal people to kind of agree to whatever's gonna happen, or the Aboriginal leadership. So there's always the leadership. leadership it's not the ordinary aboriginal people don't have very much to do with this as the leadership the leadership we're very upset about getting rid of all these aboriginal kinds of special designations and then we started to move on this other path which ellen karence who tom

and i knew quite well um who is a wonderful political scientist who wrote the book citizens plus he said we embarked upon a parallelist type of which was we weren't going to try to bring Aboriginal people in as citizens, they were going to be seen as this separate society and it was characterized in terms of this nation-to-nation relationship to Rwampum and the whole legal context started to emerge within that kind of framework. So the idea was is that you had these separate Aboriginal, nations with their own kind of legal kind of framework that would exist side by side of like the Canadian kind of framework. And because it was, and this is going to get into some controversial ideas here, it was never recognized that Aboriginal groups were less developed, less culturally developed than modern societies that the whole framework didn't make any sense because it was assuming there was a similar level of development like Quebec like it was

seen almost like the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada so Quebec can become a state if it chooses to do so as so far we've managed to have arrangements so that that doesn't happen but if they wanted to become sovereign they could become sovereign that was how aboriginal groups were seen but aboriginal groups are small less productive and less complex and that they don't have the the kind of institutional development that you see in a in a province like Quebec so they can never become states they're going to be always kind of in some kind of dependency relationship with the Canadian state. And so we have been building this now for 50 years.

And my argument is, and Albert Howard actually, so we developed us together, is that this was a strategy of a group of lawyers and consultants that, you know, kind of seized on these kind of legal ambiguities to create this infrastructure that doesn't make any sense and has been used to extract funding for the last 50 years and it's getting more and more irrational and more and more expensive because we're trying to work with a framework which which doesn't really make any sense sure you need some follow-ups on that one I'm not sure how much Tom agrees with me I have read his book first nation's second thoughts very carefully and I think we're in agreement on a lot of these matters of course he would take the adam smith kind of theoretical kind

of uh backing and i would take the uh historical materialist theoretical backing but the developmental question i think we were in agreement on yeah francis thinks she's a marxist but the truth i don't i don't i don't agree that i don't accept that term because i i'm an academic so i i look at it from a truthfulness kind of position you know that's not a political she thinks she's a democratic socialist will you accept that label no i'm i uh a i uh orwellian socialist and maybe a historical materialist is okay is the theoretical framework well i was just going to say the the funny part that all her friends now are conservatives no i have some friends who are you still have some friends from historical materialists but they're not you know they're they're generally quiet

it. They don't want to have the same treatment. They don't want to get the same treatment. No, well, I can understand that. Anyway, but we conservatives are happy to support Francis. No, I'm happy to, anyone who wants to pursue the truth as in the objective sense of a common reality, I can sit down with anyone who has that position. She's the sharp end of our spear. She'll go anywhere. um yeah anyway go ahead want you ask some questions shah yes well i'm just like okay so we sit here in 2025 okay you go you can see it playing out this parallel i think that's the word you used uh francis of these these two parallel societies you got i don't know you just got every day and then you got this this one side by side that wants to be a nation within a nation

they they they've i mean we have i mean just all the things playing out in society right now. I was saying to Francis earlier, Tom, you know, you go to an oiler's game. Heck, you watch it on the TV. What happens? A land acknowledgement. And it's being taught everywhere with it. And there's this guilt that's being seated into society that were all just awful human beings forever to have moved to Canada and taken over land that was theirs and on and on. And it takes away some of the historical context. And so you sit here in 2025 and you and you know i watch francis go to um different universities and get absolutely mobbed i'm like this this is this is this is something like you know and yet it's

this this two-tracked we have one narrative and that is um what has been done in the past is awful and that by even bringing up any conversation around it becomes denialism i'm probably oversimplifying that and i don't know if there's a question in there other than that That is what I see here in 2025. No, I think it's correct. I think the promotion of guilt is an important part of the strategy. And land acknowledgments do that. But another part we haven't talked about yet is the claims about Indian residential schools

to make Canadians feel terribly guilty about the way that Indian children were treated at the residential schools. and, you know, the extreme claims that bodies of dead children have been found, which they haven't, no bodies have been found anywhere. But these claims, which are usually repeated in the legacy media without any scrutiny, are essential to fostering this sense of guilt. And so if I can now start making a bit of a plug, Francis and I and others have published two books on this subject. the first is called grave error and the second is called dead wrong and they're both available only on amazon and they are both amazon bestsellers i check this morning and uh they maintain a list on uh first nations in canada books about them and uh dead wrong is number one and grave error is

number two among the 100 top bestsellers about First Nations in Canada. So there is a hunger in the Canadian public to get straight information. And Grave Error, which was published two years ago, has now sold over 25,000 copies, which for Canada is extraordinary. I mean, this is a book with 800 footnotes. It's not light reading. It's written by a combination of retired professors and the lawyers mainly and journalists. It's not easy reading.

But it's been selling. And now Dead Wrong is, which brings the story up to carry on. First, Grave Air was published in 2021, excuse me, 2023. And then Dead Wrong carries the story up in the two years subsequent to that. So we're doing what we can to combat the sense of guilt. We're pointing out there's really nothing for Canadians. Well, let me rephrase that. Residential schools, there were 143 of them.

They existed for more than a century. Large numbers of students went there at various times. I'm sure that bad things happened. I mean, they do in all boarding schools all over the world. George Orwell has written about his experience in boarding school in England. So I'm not here to defend everything that happened in every boarding school every year. But as a system, I can't see a better option. And, you know, it wasn't compulsory.

More Indian children went to day schools on reserves than went to the boarding schools. Parents had to apply for it. And up until about 1990, it was generally considered. a kind of a premium form of education for the for Indian children so yeah it's but but it's maintained by the as Francis talks about the leadership it's maintained by these people constantly elaborated on to promote a sense of guilt in the larger population well it does two things it promotes us the The sense of grievance among Indians makes them more willing to support their leadership initiatives, to turn out in mobs, to beat up people like Francis.

But then it also, in the larger canvas, it promotes a sense of guilt among the rest of the population and makes them feel that they have an obligation to, you know, support first nations in a lavish way. I was looking at the main estimates for next year. The way I read the math, the government expects to spend about $42 billion on indigenous peoples. Mostly that's on First Nations on reserves. There are some programs for Métis and you know what and so on. But the largest, 90% of that is for First Nations. And, I mean, that's a lot of money, even today, you know. I mean, it's probably more than we spend on the Canadian forces. I haven't checked that amount in the main estimates.

But so now my wife is wandering it. Never a dull moment in Tom's house. Never a dull moment here, yeah. So anyway, again, I've forgotten what the question was. I just start riffing on it, you know. Well, you started to point out how much money has been going that way. One thing there that, yeah, I was asking about guilt, but, you know, it's interesting because I've definitely read some different books on it.

Now you've rattled off two that are on the bestsellers list, and I'm going to assume there's been a whole bunch of people on this audience that have read them. And if they haven't, it'd probably behoved them to go pick it up, heavy reading or not, because it'd be interesting to, you know, get some facts, you know, because when you get a narrative set over and over and over again, and you're going to be interesting. question said narrative in today's climate francis is literally living out the climate of today which is to shut down any conversation surrounding it you mentioned that uh you know one of the thing that one of the things that is not often told is that parents of indian kids had to apply

for it i i don't know if i you know once again i i'm just a lay person folks i don't know if i'd heard that i thought it was you know some of the stories i've been told is that they rounded it up kids and off they went and it's never that it was parents trying to get them a better education or anything like that yeah no the you had to apply uh parents if sometimes there were no parents you know orphans or uh abused and neglected children so sometimes it was a guardian but there had to be a responsible person had to apply um admission had to be approved Sometimes it wasn't approved because the school was full. Those applications are in government records.

Many of them are easily available online today. You could go read them. And as I say, only a minority of students ever went to the residential schools. It was mostly the big numbers were in the west and in the north where small populations over large distances made day schools impractical. in the east in Ontario and Quebec particularly or the Maritimes more students went to day schools but there were some in in the West as well depended on the situation you know this notion of rounding up it has I think the basis in historical fact is that for remote communities the practical way to get the kids to residential school

was to transport them in a group. So like, for example, a bus would go out to a remote reserve if it had a road that was passable and would collect the kids who were going. They didn't just go out and grab kids. But, you know, the kids, kids whose parents had applied for a residential school would be put together in a group and taken back. Now, did the children fully understand this?

I mean, some of them were only seven years old. They may not have understood that their parents had applied for it. They may have thought that authority was taking them away from their families, but the reality was that the parents had applied for it, and they were being transported in a group. It could be by bus. In more modern times, it sometimes was by a plane for very remote northern reserves. Sometimes it was by train.

For example, almost all the schools were religious, either Catholic or Protestant. So to take an example, you had Protestant parents on the West Coast who wanted their children to go to a Protestant Protestant residential school, but there weren't very many in BC. There was a handful on the coast, but they tended to be full. And also there were denominational differences between the Anglicans and United Church. So parents would say, okay, I want my children to go to the United Church Residential School in

Edmonton. And then they would be taken in a group from Prince Rupert, let's say, by train and there would be a I don't know a group of 10 or 12 who knows exactly and they would travel as a group with supervision and be picked up in Edmonton and taken out to the residential school there so there were you know different things happened which have given rise to this legend that children were you know basically kidnapped and taken to the schools but that's you know that that's completely false but it is true that students were sometimes transported in groups as a practical way of getting them there.

And sometimes, as Tom did mention, the only case where there was possibly intervention by the RCMP or that kind of action would be if there was some word of the state, kind of like apprehension of children who were living in neglected homes. There's a very interesting CBC documentary that was done in 1991 on the Williams Lake School. And this was before the CBC had become completely captured by activism and doesn't have objective standards anymore with respect to examining Aboriginal issues. Anyway, there was one woman who was interviewed who was saying that she found that the residential schools were a place of safety because there was so much drunkenness and violence in her home that she was not safe being at home. So those kinds of cases you can see because you see it now where you've got a mother who is not fit to be a mother and you're trying to apprehend the children. mother is fighting to the nail to keep the children. So I can imagine those kinds of scenarios

taking place. As well, I wanted to just ask because I I'm not sure in terms of these remote communities because you it was it was I believe the wording was you had to attend a residential school if there was not a day school that was available in your community. So in terms of that mandatory character when there was no day school tom maybe you could were there applications that still had to be made or because there was no real alternative that people had yeah yes there were still applications required uh that that amendment to the law wasn't passed until 1920 so prior to 1920 there was no compulsion at all to attend a residential school or any really any school in practice. After 1920, the law said that you had to attend a residential school if there was no

day school available. But it wasn't systematically enforced. And actually, there was a shocking number of young kids, indie kids who never went to any school whatsoever. I'm not saying it was never enforced, but it wasn't enforced systematically. and yes and parental or the equivalent of a parental application some kind of guardian had to apply for placement in a residential school and the child had to be accepted if there was space available and then after that point here we get into the notion of perhaps of missing children and unmarked graves every child. received a number as is true in all residential schools in the world everywhere and the child was very carefully tracked both by the school and by the federal government because the funding of the schools was on a capitation basis per capita grant for each for student the money didn't go to the student but based on the number of students the school received a federal grant

So the school didn't want to be losing students. I mean, sometimes students withdrew. The parents have the right to take the students out, and that happened. But the school kept track of students because they needed the numbers for their grants. At the other end, the federal government kept track because they didn't want to be paying for students who weren't there anymore or who had never come. and they didn't want to be paying for white or Méti kids who sometimes got into the schools

even though by legislation the schools were only for Indians but particularly in remote areas where you had small numbers of white and Métis people they often saw the residential school as the best available alternative

that's what happened with Senator Gladstone the first Indian senator he was from the blood reservation but he was born a Métis or white depending on how you want to count account the background but there wasn't any school available

where the remote part the frontier where his parents lived and so his grandfather who was a Scotsman arranged for him to attend the residential school of them. Now, I can't remember exactly how they worked out the payment, but they did. It's all in Hugh Dempsey's biography of Senator Gladstone. All the details are there. And Gladstone liked it, and he learned to speak the Blackfoot language, and he married an Indian girl from the school.

And eventually, after a long time, he became an Indian himself. Although there was quite a bit quite a bit of opposition. Indian men often didn't like the idea of non-Indians joining. But eventually they accepted him and he became a local leader, you know, and they eventually appointed to the Senate. You know, and a big advocate for residential schools in their day. By the late 1940s, Senator Gladstone thought that the time had come for some other model. but he and his family supported the,

he sent us all his kids to the same residential school. So anyway, again, I've kind of forgotten what the question was. I just wanted to bring up something that Tom mentioned because this is a constant source of confusion that is perpetrated by academics like Sean Carlton from the University of Manitoba, which is the question of missing children and bodies found

And what is being talked about when that is mentioned, and this is something that was in the TRC report, and there was a report done by, I can't remember his name, but he did a report for the TRC on this missing burials. Anyway, it is the cemeteries. It's the question of cemeteries. So cemeteries exist in association with the residential schools. Sometimes, sometimes it's part of a wider parish where children. from the residential school who died of usually tuberculosis is buried and what happens is is that the markers for those burials existed initially but they were made of wood and so they deteriorated and then they're no longer in existence and if you look at the camloops Indian band cemetery which is across from the Catholic Church, you'll see the kind of the disrepair, the cemetery is falling into disrepair.

So there's children buried there, but people don't know exactly where those children are buried because the markers don't exist. And that issue of not knowing exactly where children are buried is confused with the claim that there's these clandestine burials. So, there's no evidence of clandestine burials at this time. No evidence of a child being murdered and put in a grave that was secret.

What's being talked about is these parents not knowing exactly what plot of land. We have Romeo Saginaesh, who was an MP. His brother died at a residential school in Moose Factory, was buried in the cemetery there. But his mother did not know exactly what area of the cemetery he was buried in, and this was found, you know, through research and so on. Tanya Tallaga, who wrote the book, The Knowing, her relative Annie, I think it was her grandmother, was at an asylum and was buried in a cemetery that now has become just a grassy patch next to the Gardner Expressway. And through research, Tanya Talaga was able to find where that grassy patch was and her family traveled there to do a ceremony on that grassy patch. But although those are maybe issues that need to be resolved, they're not the same as saying that children were murdered and buried in secret graves. And Kimberly Murray, the special interlocutor who is doing this quote unquote missing children,

kind of, you know, examination, she actually said in 2023, in I believe, a parliamentary hearing, that the children aren't missing. They're buried in cemeteries. And so that really needs to be understood. So, you know, saying where are the bodies and no bodies have been found, this is not exactly accurate because there are bodies, but they're buried in cemeteries. And no one should be surprised to find human remains in a cemetery. Francis has expressed this very, very little well. You know, there's nothing I can add. Well, if I just get to where we are today, and I, I, you know, you got Cowichin.

So you have this fee simple title dispute. And you can see how it's, it's spreading across. Canada and for sure BC right now you have the city of Camelps correct and then you have New Brunswick where they're putting claim to 60% of New Brunswick and you go like where does this end like at what point can we just open this up and be like this we're going down like insane territory was probably 50 years ago where we're at today I think I sit here and I go, well, you know, what's going to, what's going to stop? Yeah, everybody, it was Barry Kirkham, the lawyer, and people can go back and listen to that,

who talked about, you know, like, it shouldn't happen in Alberta and Saskatchewan because they have treaties and on and I'm like, yeah, but if it's already happening in BC, and they're already doing things that they normally wouldn't do in law, what's going to stop this from coming in every other province because they can make the case that it was signed under duress or something along those lines. And I think a ton of people in Canada are very uncomfortable with the notion of fee simple title being, I don't know what the word is. You two probably have a better word than I will. And then, you know, you go further. Any criticism or any discussion around 215 graves or anything to do with this. If it isn't on the one side of the equation, the other side is

just told to shut up and not show up. And you go, okay, but where does this take us to in the next 10 years. I mean, you two probably talk, discussed, written books on the history of it, but when you look at where we're sitting at today and where this is going, do you see where this eventually ascends? First Nations is just doing everything. They're the new power to be and we just pay allegiance to that and you're okay and we just move on with life or is there something that I don't know, can shake people out of this like, are we going to talk about this or aren't we going to talk about this? Yeah.

Well, I think the objective of many elements of the First Nations, not everybody, but many elements in the First Nations leadership, would like to expand this as far as they can so they can extract payments. They become the new landlords. And instead of paying taxes to the various instrumentalities of the crown, provincial government school boards, et cetera, you would pay tax to the First Nation, you know, I suspect that's what they have in mind. There is an off-ramp here, which hasn't yet been used.

I think it's staring us in the face. The Supreme Court of Canada, in several decisions, including the landmarks, so-cotein decision on Aboriginal title, developed the doctrine of justifiable infringement. It didn't say that Aboriginal title is indefeasible to use the legal term. It said that under certain circumstances, the Crown can infringe Aboriginal title. So that could include granting mining permits or pipeline right-of-ways. or it could include housing for tens of millions of Canadians. The BC lawyers did not argue justifiable infringement,

as far as I know, in the college case. BC has a long record of incompetent advocacy in the courts, but I'm probably don't have time to go into that, but this is another example of BC not using what I think would be the most applicable doctrine sitting there. It's already there. You don't have to develop it new. It's already there.

The Supreme Court's black letter law. So you would argue that granting of title for fee simple title for Holmes is a justifiable infringement in a country. like Canada, which has 42 million people who have to live somewhere. And so we're going to defend what has happened in the past. That leaves open the possibility of negotiating new agreements where they haven't existed in the past. But it would foreclose the possibility of First Nations trying to take over existing land titles. and either displace the people.

I don't know if they would go that far. The backlash would be enormous, but I mean, there's already a political backlash, but I think at least for now, the goal is probably to grab a share of revenue either by getting the provincial government to pay them something or by becoming a tax collector in their own right.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, So lawyers can argue this, but from my reading of the past cases, I think that this notion of justifiable infringement of Aboriginal title is a viable one and could be used as a defense, but the BC government didn't use it. Yeah, and in the meantime, Tom, like there's going to be more claims made. You go on the economic corridor route, you know, with what Daniel Smith and they have, MOU, you know, we're going to have a pipeline go through B.C. Well, now we have to bring in First Nations to approve it along with BC, along with the federal

government along. And you go, sitting here is just a regular Canadian. I go, so nothing is going to get done. And in the meantime, they're going to have fee simple title come into effect of where they are going to have ownership of it. People won't be able to sell their houses, won't be able to do any of that. like the the the if there was ever a lack of trust in canadian society it's growing and if you're an economic um you know investor you want to invest in a country and see projects built

that's going to be but it's already grinding to a halt of his at a complete stop and you go like where does this take us yeah and it takes us into a poorer country and they can they can become the landowner but i mean if nobody comes here to put in capital investment other than than the federal government giving word service that we're going to have these things, but they're going to say on the other side, we're not going to approve them. We're in this stalemate of nothing happening, and nobody wanting to come here and invest in it. Well, what's required, like I say, the legal doctrine exists, but you have to have governments, both federal and provincial,

who are willing to use the legal resources. in an earlier life I had a career as an expert witness in litigation half a dozen cases before I was hired by provincial or federal lawyers working for you know the crown in both treaty and average nor rights cases and at that time and I'm talking about the 80s 90s there were crown lawyers who would play hardball and they would use the doctors that were there and every they won every case that I was on I would like to take credit but I just played a small role but my point is that they they played hardball and normal legal tactics and so on and they one but since uh well certainly since the liberals came to power in 2015 crown lawyers have been

instructed not to play hardball there's a practice directed from jody wilson raybold who instructed the department of justice um to seek a settlement by negotiation rather than litigation yeah so the federal government has been largely passive in aboriginal litigation they're negotiating huge costly settlements and also giving away jurisdictional capacity as well as money um to change that you've got to change the government you got there has to be a government that understands what's going on and is willing to use the resources of the crown these battles are winnable you're talking about a small element of Canadian population they claim to be 1.9 million but that's an exaggeration that includes a lot of people who just

have an element of Aboriginal ancestry but aren't really part of anything and that's where you get into the the cultural shift that has happened there's a couple of huge problems that are much deeper than just a change in government. The first is the capturing of the legal profession and to some extent the judiciary, which has been happening. And Alan Cairns pointed this out in his book, Citizens Plus. There's a really good section on the Aboriginal industry's role in the legal profession and the law schools, the judiciary.

So a judge is going to have to decide on it. The Supreme Court, if you've been watching the packing up, the Supreme Court with what's called wokeism which is identity politics that has become totalitarian is very disturbing and then there is this this whole territorial land acknowledgement guilt tripping that's going on this is made Canadians reluctant to assert arguments in defense of equality for all in Canada and that they should accept lesser steps status because they are these horrible, racist, colonialists, and they deserve everything they get, like this kind of thing, which is like nonsense.

We should all see ourselves as being part of the same system that we're fighting for to create a better world for everyone. And Aboriginal people, the ordinary Aboriginal person, is going to be the worst off because of what's going to happen. This idea of Aboriginal leaders collecting revenue, they're going to keep it for themselves. And then the tax base is going to be depleted, which is going to be what's going to be funding the marginalized Aboriginal segment. So it's just a terrible system that has been unfolding for the last 50 years and people have got to wake up and realize that they are being manipulated. Compassion for the terrible conditions of Aboriginal people is being used to have this authoritarian type of momentum, which is increasing, rapidly increasing. Look at British Columbia. And one final thing I'll say is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

That has been put into British Columbia law. That is one of the worst developments that's ever happened in British Columbia's history. And we are just beginning to get a taste of what's going to be happening because of that legislation, which needs to be immediately repealed. Yeah. Well, and Francis is right. It's not a purely political problem as a cultural shift is required, but government can play a role in a cultural shift that can appoint different judges if it can find them, better ones. It can cut off funding to groups that are spreading malevolent doctrines. It can set a good example in its own conduct. So, you know, as a political scientist, I say, start with, I have to start with garden. But, you know, cultural shift is important.

And here we are. We're talking to the Canadian Joe Rogan. Maybe we will have some effect about the culture as well. Well, I appreciate that compliment. Either way, thank you both for giving me some time this morning and doing this. And Francis, for giving us some extended time. Normally, I'd air these two separate, but they'll be put together. I think they, you know, the conversations blend well together.

And thank you both for giving me some time this morning. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.