The Orwellian Attempt To Criminalize Residential School “Denialism”

The movement afoot in Canada to prohibit by law statements interpreted as skepticism of the prevailing narrative surrounding residential schools represents a critical threat to free speech.

Introduced in October 2025 by NDP MP Leah Gazan, Bill C-254, an Act to amend the Criminal Code (promotion of hatred against Indigenous peoples), would “create an offence of wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada through statements communicated other than in private conversation.”

The bill would impose a prison term of up to two years for those who publicly communicate statements which are determined to be “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying” residential schools.

Offences covered by this sweeping expansion of hate speech legislation could theoretically include anything from saying “Many of the intentions behind residential schools were noble” to “The abuses at residential schools were tragic but do not constitute a genocide” to “I will not believe in the existence of huge numbers of unmarked graves at residential schools unless conclusive evidence is presented”.

The strength and validity of each of the above three statements is certainly debatable, but criminalizing the statements themselves closes off all avenues to debate in favour of a brittle consensus imposed from above. Do we want Canada to join the ranks of those nations which legislate a single worldview that must be accepted and regurgitated by their trembling citizens?

Criminalizing residential school “denial” would be unprecedented. Canada has never before intervened to mandate a state-sanctioned interpretation of any other Canadian historical event.

We are free to call Louis Riel a hero, a violent fanatic, a mad prophet, or simply a complicated man. We can say the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad was the glorious completion of a national dream, or a white supremacist project built on the backs of underpaid Chinese workers against the will of Indigenous peoples. We can say the refusal to allow the immigrant steamship Komagata Maru to dock in Vancouver in 1914 was an unforgivable act of racism or an exercise of our right as a sovereign country to determine our own immigration policy.

Disagreement, even vehement and passionate disagreement, about historical events is the nature of the study of history. Without disagreement, there is no study of history, just an unexamined orthodoxy.

The House of Commons has not yet voted on Gazan’s bill, but discussion is accelerating.

In July, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) unanimously passed a resolution calling on the federal government to criminalize residential school denialism.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has come down against MP Leah Gazan’s bill, saying we should educate people about residential schools instead of expanding hate speech laws. In response, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) Grand Chief Kyra Wilson said that “Education matters, but it cannot be the only response to the deliberate denial of what happened to our children in residential schools”.

Gazan’s bill is not the first attempt to criminalize dissenting narratives on residential schools.

In June, Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell brought forward an amendment that would have added residential school denialism to the Combatting Hate Act, a bill passed by the House of Commons which cracked down on hate crimes but did not mention residential schools. This proposal was rejected in the Senate by a vote of 32-41.

The push to criminalize residential school “denialism” may be founded on good intentions, at least on the part of some of the actors involved.

Senator Karetak-Lindell, for instance, is herself an Indigenous woman who attended a residential school in her youth. Many Canadians today attended these schools when they were young, and many of them suffered. Many more Canadians know someone who attended. All of this adds a poignant layer of personal connection and memory to the whole debate.

The validity of the emotional dimension of discussions surrounding residential schools should not be carelessly dismissed, but neither should it be allowed to be used as a shield to deflect all criticism from a troubling attempt to introduce blatant state censorship into history debates.

If a bill to impose two-year prison sentences on Canadians who make statements “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying” residential schools does pass, it will ironically become the law of the land in a country whose students are still assigned George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

In this great dystopian work the reader is introduced to an authoritarian society in which an all-powerful state has asserted control of the historical narrative. Orwell paints a dismal picture of a world without free thought and speech: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Criminalizing dissenting views of residential schools risks leading Canada much closer towards becoming a society where historical truth is established by the state rather than freely debated and discussed by the people.