Canada is pulling funds from groups still searching for alleged bodies buried at Indigenous residential schools funded by Catholics and other Christians.
An organization and a committee of experts formed to search for the elusive remains have both lost funding in the past month, following four years of searches that have found zero remains. The Survivors’ Secretariat and the committee both say they have lost funding this year, the CBC reported.
One of the committee’s founding members, Crystal Gail Fraser, told the outlet in mid-February that the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials would have to stop operating when its current funding agreement expires at the end of March.
Around the same time, the leader of Survivors’ Secretariat, Laura Arndt, told the CBC that funding for her nonprofit was also cut, though she believes the cut was due to criticism of the liberal government.
Arndt told the outlet that she had warned the government in December that her organization was nearly out of money but was denied additional funding on January 23, 2025. That denial said her organization had $4.2 million in “unspent funds,” a claim Arndt denied.
The CBC noted that Arndt’s organization received around $10.3 million since 2021 from Canada’s $320 million Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund. The Canadian government says the group spent $6.1 million during that time, while the organization claims it spent $8.5 million. That still leaves them with $2.5 million, but they face a dispute with the Canadian government about whether some expenditures are seen as legitimate under the funding program’s conditions.
The committee and organization’s entire existence is based on the notion that hundreds of children were killed at residential schools and buried in unmarked graves – a narrative that has seemingly fallen apart. The initial claims in 2021 led to apologies, riots, and the vandalism or burning of 55 Canadian churches, The Daily Wire previously reported.
The narrative began to fall apart in early 2022, less than a year after it made national headlines, The Daily Wire reported at the time.
The remains were reportedly discovered by anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who used ground-penetrating radar to find the remains allegedly buried on the grounds sometime between 1890 and 1978 while the Kamloops Indian Residential School operated. The discovery was reported by Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation, who said in a statement in May 2021 that “[g]iven the size of the school, with up to 500 students registered and attending at any one time, we understand that this confirmed loss affects First Nations communities across British Columbia and beyond.”
As The Daily Wire reported at the time, no remains had actually been excavated.
But the preliminary report on the remains was “based on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains,” Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Montreal, wrote in the Canadian journal The Dorchester Review.
Rouillard’s writing came after Beaulieu reduced the number of remains she claimed to have found from 215 to 200 “probable burials.” Beaulieu, however, could never confirm that what she discovered were the remains of children or tree roots since the site was not excavated.
Even after the Canadian government spent hundreds of millions of dollars excavating the site, no remains were found, The Daily Wire reported in 2023.
