A BC Conservative MLA is standing her ground over social media posts she made over the weekend regarding the language used to describe unmarked graves at former residential schools.
BC Conservative Leader John Rustad has asked Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie to take the posts down, but they remain up.
Over the weekend, Brodie, the BC Conservative attorney general critic, raised concerns about the “apparent mistreatment” of a lawyer who called on the Law Society of BC to change the language in training material to refer to “potential” burial sites at the former residential school in Kamloops, rather than more definitive wording.
In her posts, Brodie said there are “zero” confirmed child burial sites at the school.
“I think the contents of the tweet are really important. The importance of truth and evidence in a legal context is the cornerstone of everything in law,” Brodie said Monday.
“There are wounds there from what happened in the residential schools. There is no question about that. This is a specific case.”
The Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation said in 2021 that ground penetrating radar provided “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” at the school site, but last year said the radar found “confirmation of 215 anomalies.”
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The nation has not yet moved to excavate the site amid ongoing conversations with survivors. But Indigenous British Columbians say there is no question children were buried at the institution and many others in the province.
“We know children were abused, we know children died in those residential schools. That is a fact. We don’t have to go dig up a burial site to say those children are there, because we know there are some that are still missing and out there,” Musqueam First Nation intergovernmental affairs officer Wade Grant said.
“She’s got to understand that she’s got a number of people that survived those residential schools that live in her riding, so she has really driven a wedge between the community.”
Brodie’s comments appear to risk driving a wedge within her own caucus as well.
On Monday, BC Conservative House Leader Áʼa꞉líya Warbus, who is Indigenous, appeared to respond with her own social media post.
“Questioning the narratives of people who lived and survived these atrocities, is nothing but harmful and taking us backward in reconciliation,” Warbus wrote.
Former BC Conservative Bryan Breguet, meanwhile, backed Brodie for refusing to remove the post.
“John Rustad is a coward and needs to be replaced,” he wrote.
Rustad, for his part, said he asked Brodie to remove the post because of concern it would be “misinterpreted.”
The fact that no bodies have yet been exhumed at the Kamloops site does not detract from the fact that residential schools were the sites of many deaths, he said.
“They were taken from their families and more than 4,000 children did not return home, those children died in residential schools,” Rustad said.
“They decided at the time not to send the deceased home for burial, they buried them on site. So just about every residential school in the country has a cemetery, has children who passed at a residential school who have been buried there.”
Canada’s special interlocutor on unmarked graves and missing children said in a report last year that despite the “well-documented reality” of residential school deaths, some Canadians have made a concerted effort to attack the truths of survivors, Indigenous families and communities.
More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996.
— With files from the Canadian Press
