Before Justin Trudeau came to power in late 2015, he had said that the welfare of Indigenous peoples would be his highest priority. Let’s look at his record in that regard. There are far too many initiatives to discuss them all, so I will single out two that I think are of long-term importance – his enormous increase in expenditure on Indigenous affairs and his support for the “Kamloops narrative” of missing children buried in unmarked graves on the sites of Indian Residential Schools. Unfortunately, these policy initiatives have worked together to impede rather than foster reconciliation.
Opening the floodgates
First, let’s follow the money. In the last Conservative budget (fiscal 2015–16), spending on Indigenous affairs was slightly less than $11 billion. In the last budget prepared by the Trudeau government, fiscal 2024–25, the corresponding figure was about $32 billion – almost triple in nominal dollars, or about 2.3 times as much in inflation-adjusted dollars. If federal budgetary spending was the measure of whether Justin Trudeau delivered on his promise to put Indigenous peoples first, he certainly delivered in spades.
But that was not all. The Trudeau government also opened the floodgates for settling claims based on historical grievances. The Harper government set the prototype in 2008 with the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, which provided over $5 billion to the “survivors” of residential schools. This was lauded at the time as the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, but the Harper government did not approve any more settlements of this type.
Once the Liberals came to power, the Department of Justice became much more open to Indigenous claims of historical grievance, formalized in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s (she was the first Indigenous Minister of Justice) practice directive, which instructed officials to negotiate rather than litigate. Multibillion-dollar settlements proliferated under the new policy. At first, they were for various forms of Indigenous education, such as day schools, day scholars in residential schools and First Nations students who boarded in town while attending public or Catholic schools. But they also quickly spread into other policy areas, culminating in the mammoth $40-billion-plus settlement for alleged underspending by the federal government for foster care of children on Indian reserves. Compensation was to be paid not only to the children who had survived the system but also to their parents, even though in many cases the parents would have been guilty of the neglect or abuse which caused their children to be taken into care. Further huge settlements loom on the horizon for claims that have not yet been settled, such as for foster care of children living off-reserve.
A smaller but fast-growing stream of spending is that for “specific claims,” which allege violations of treaty rights or provisions of the Indian Act. These used to involve mostly the allocated size of reserves or the loss of reserve land through “cutoffs” for various purposes. More recently, “cows and plows” complaints about the inadequacy of agricultural assistance have become both numerous and expensive. In fiscal 2015–16, when the Liberals came to power, the federal government paid out $27 million for specific claims. In fiscal 2024–25, the payout total had risen to $7.1 billion – extraordinary growth by any standard.
In 2024, I tried to measure whether this “avalanche of money” was improving the lives of First Nations people living on Indian reserves, who are by any measure the worst-off identity group in Canada. Using the Community Well-Being Index as an indicator, I found that the gap between Indian reserves and other communities in Canada had been significantly reduced between 2016 and 2021, which looks like a victory for Trudeau’s policy of opening the fiscal floodgates. However, closer analysis (the details are complicated) strongly suggests that the improvement was due to the major enrichment of the Canada Child Benefit in 2016. This is a program that benefits all Canadians, but First Nations people tend to benefit more because they tend to have more children, and their lower average income means that less of the CCB is taxed back. Hence the closing of the gap with other communities, at least with respect to income.
It’s an important lesson about racial targeting. The biggest improvement in status Indians’ lives came from nontargeted legislation meant to benefit all Canadian families. Where did all the other Indigenous spending go? Much of the increase in annual budgets was spent on hiring new federal civil servants as well as employees of First Nations. This increase may lead to more effective public services, which over time may result in higher well-being, but the results are not yet visible. The adage of the Sermon on the Mount that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the proof of things unseen” applies to public policy as well as religious commitment.
As for claims settlements, much of that revenue goes to payments to individuals, which do not show up in well-being statistics because they are not reported for tax purposes. Little systematic evidence is available about how First Nations individuals use these payments, but anecdotal reports suggest the benefits are often dissipated on consumer goods. Also, a large share of settlement revenue goes into settlement trusts, whose use is not revealed to the public.
The Kamloops narrative
The other thing about Indigenous Affairs in the Trudeau years that historians will remember is his very public support for unverified claims that unmarked graves of missing children had been discovered on the grounds of former Indian Residential Schools. On May 27, 2021, the Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops Indian Band) announced that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had located the remains of 215 “missing children.” These were allegedly “undocumented deaths” from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which had closed 52 years earlier. The anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution that only excavation could confirm that these were indeed burials, but a moral panic was already unleashed. Politicians and media immediately seized on the first announcement, and “burials of missing children” was the storyline that ricocheted around Canada and indeed much of the world. Meanwhile, several other First Nations that had at one time hosted Indian Residential Schools hired their own anthropologists armed with GPR and announced similar discoveries.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on May 30 by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the “215 children from the Kamloops residential school who never made it home,” thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, November 11, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its okay. This was unprecedented in Canadian history.
In the wake of the announcements, many Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalized or even burned to the ground. Some of these were historic church buildings still used and revered by Native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43 per cent of all residential schools. An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on May 28 and updated on October 5 under the same title. “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all,” said the story.
Because the corporate media take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the “news story of the year.” And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to “a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada.”
Prime Minister Trudeau did nothing to correct the record, yet all the major elements of the story were either false or highly exaggerated. No unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone children’s graves.
Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves have run into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It is hardly surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery. But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.
In August 2021, the federal government announced $321 million in special grants to First Nations for research about unmarked graves, and Budget 2022 contained a five-year line item of $275 million for “addressing the shameful legacy of residential schools.” A few excavations were attempted at Indian Residential School sites, but no bodies were discovered. The Kamloops band used its money for other purposes and did not even attempt to dig.
Despite the steady flow of disconfirming evidence, Prime Minister Trudeau and other ministers in his government clung fast to the Kamloops narrative of missing children and unmarked graves. Their main response was to label critics of the Kamloops narrative “deniers” and to toy with legislation (fortunately not passed) to make “denialism” of Indigenous “genocide” either a criminal offence or a violation of human rights law.
Reconciliation is supposed to be based on truth; that’s why we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Embracing a false narrative fosters the opposite of reconciliation. Labelling Canada a genocidal nation and threatening to prosecute “denialists” aggravates a sense of grievance on the Indigenous side while making others cynical about a pseudo-reconciliation based on falsehood.
During his time in government, Justin Trudeau taught Indigenous people that their welfare is best served by lobbying the government for more money, cultivating old grievances and even inventing new grievances without factual foundation. Not surprisingly, sociologists report that relations between Indigenous people and other Canadians are worse in 2025 than when he came to office in 2015. The Holy Grail of reconciliation seems further off than ever.
