The Globe and Mail has admitted to a “failure of journalism” in 2021 with its reporting of “mass graves” at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In a May 30 editorial, the national newspaper’s editorial board wrote that the claim 215 children's remains had been found was “an extraordinary assertion” that “requires proof.”

The editorial said the "starting point for the media” in 2021 should have been searching for evidence when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation issued a press release announcing “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.

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“The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion,” said the editorial.

The newspaper said the fact of historical crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools “does not automatically validate the claims of missing remains being found” or the reference to “mass graves.”

In the aftermath, more than 100 Christian churches, mainly Catholic, have been torched and vandalized across the country. The residential schools were mostly run by Christian denominations and religious orders.

The editorial noted that media changed their wording gradually to refer to “possible or probable graves,” but said the lesson learned was that “assertions about residential schools should be listened to carefully, and then, just as carefully, held up to scrutiny.”

The Globe and Mail also pointed at politicians who had made unverified comments, saying then-B.C. Premier John Horgan called Kamloops “a tragedy of unimaginable proportions,” something he “had no way of knowing whether that was true.”

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Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “made much more dramatic pronouncements that were also not founded in fact” and ordered the Canadian flag to be flown at half-mast at all federal buildings. The flag remained lowered for more than five months.

Although Horgan died in 2024, Trudeau “still has the opportunity to set the record straight,” said the editorial. “He has not; neither has the current Liberal government.”

The editorial also said Ottawa has yet to account for hundreds of millions of dollars sent to First Nations to establish whether the soil anomalies are human remains.

In the days leading up to the editorial, The Globe and Mail and the National Post both carried reports about the five-year anniversary of the Kamloops press release. “Since the announcement in 2021, the story of the Tk’emlúps 215 has moved from certainty to ambiguity,” said one Globe story.

The National Post’s Terry Glavin, who came under fire for his first-anniversary investigative feature "The year of the graves: How the world's media got it wrong on mass graves," wrote last week that the reconciliation process has been tainted and genuine residential school survivors have suffered most.

Glavin noted that the flawed coverage gave rise to an expanding definition of “residential schools denialism,” which he described as a “wholly unique construct” that compares skepticism of residential stories with Holocaust denial.

The Globe’s admission was reported by other media, not all of which were supportive of the Globe’s newfound journalistic integrity. While The New York Post said the “mass-graves scam reveals the cost of media bias,” journalist Rachel Gilmore wrote in her Substack column that the editorial had “just fuelled residential school denialism.”

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In 2022, the federal government appointed Kimberly Murray as special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves. In an interim report in June 2023, Murray called on lawmakers to consider criminalizing the denial or minimization of the abuses Indigenous children suffered at residential schools.

On June 1, the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights reviewing Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, voted to amend the bill by adding criminalization of residential school denialism. However, on June 3,  the Senate voted down the amendment, according to Juno News.