My Letter to CBC Ombudsman re Barton comment that "remains of indigenous children have been found"

Dear sir/madam

I am requesting your looking into the comment by Rosemary Barton after the leaders debate (April 16) on CBC where Rosemary Barton was responding to the fact that True North and Rebel News got their questions into the candidates.

Barton said (paraphrased) that this is the problem with these news groups, that they give partial truths, ie yes the 200 churches were burned, but “yes there have been remains of indigenous children found…” Begin at 11:00 minutes:

I am not a fan of Rebel News because of its right wing gotcha journalism, so my concern here is not as an advocate for slanted news sources. (Rebel News was asking a reasonable question of Mr. Singh in this segment and he refused to answer them.)

However it is not true that bodies of children have been found. In fact the Rebel News journalist was making the point that where there have been excavations, no bodies have been found. This is true.

There are other sites where bands have refused to excavate, Kamloops being the most obvious, so we cannot be sure what will be found -- if anything -- until excavations are performed. Kamloops band (Casimir being chief there) received funds to excavate but did not do so. This raises serious questions about the credibility of their claims.

CBC should be pressing governments and bands to pursue excavations so we will know what is true. It seems likely that there are no bodies of children at Kamloops but we cannot be certain at this point.

Therefore Rosemary Barton is not helpful in this regard. At this late date, nobody should be stating that “there have been remains of indigenous children found”.

One reason, if I might speculate, why right wing news groups like Rebel News are gaining a foothold is because CBC is not doing its job.

I suspect that some journalists cannot believe that the original claims about buried children, repeated again and again, are not true, and that they made serious errors in reporting. I hope that is the case because otherwise it is intentional misinformation. And harmful to the credibility of the CBC.

I encourage you as ombudsman to press the network and Barton to look closer into this issue, and not to perpetuate dubious claims about buried children.

Robin Collins
Ottawa

FYI, I have written on this subject in my substack if you want to see a reference to my own views on this subject.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robincollins/p/indian-residential-schools-assimilation