Residential school denialism is detestable but not illegal, and that shouldn’t change, says Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who disagrees with federal Manitoba NDPer Leah Gazan’s efforts to add it to the Criminal Code.
“I have a lot of respect for MP Gazan, but I don’t think we can criminalize this. I think we have to just do the continued work of educating people and trying to combat misinformation,” Kinew told CBC Manitoba Up to Speed host Marcy Markusa on Friday.
Gazan first introduced Bill C-254, her private member’s bill to amend the Criminal Code regarding the promotion of hatred against Indigenous people, in October 2024, but it died when the spring 2025 election was called.
“If the government is serious about reconciliation, then they need to protect survivors and their families from hate,” Gazan said when she first introduced it.
“The residential school system was a genocide designed to wipe out Indigenous cultures, languages, families and heritage. To downplay, deny or justify it is cruel, harmful and hateful.”
She reintroduced it in October 2025. The bill seeks to make it illegal for anyone to condone, deny, justify or minimize the Indian residential school system in Canada through any statements beyond a private conversation.
All bills must go through three readings, which also involves committee reviews and final debates, before being granted royal assent and enacted into law.
The introduction was the first reading. The bill has yet to reach a second reading.
For a period of more than 150 years, from the 1830s until 1997, First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families and communities to residential schools, often far from their homes. Most were government-funded and run by Christian religious organizations.
The schools were designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. An estimated 150,000 children across Canada attended the schools and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has documented more than 4,000 who died while attending them.
On Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Kinew announced the province partnered with the City of Brandon to buy a popular campground property that was once part of the Brandon Residential School, which ran from 1895 until 1972.
The site that became the campground included a former school cemetery, used from 1895 to 1912, the province said in a news release on the day the purchase was announced.
This sign is at the site of the Brandon Residential School cemetery. Historical records indicate the cemetery, where children from the school were buried, was used from 1895 to 1912. The area later became a park and then a privately owned campground. (Jaison Empson/CBC)
The property still contains the remains of children, the province said.
Kinew, who dedicated a memorial at the site on Sept. 30, said on Friday that such events help educate the public on residential schools.
“It’s very well-documented. It’s very historic. So let’s make sure that we keep that history alive in our living memory as a province,” he said.
Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, which owns the land where the school once stood, will guide decisions around the former cemetery and is working with university researchers to identify the more than 50 children it believes are buried at the site.
Rev. Stan McKay, who said his maternal grandparents were forced to attend the Brandon Residential School for a good part of their life and never talked about it, called the purchase of the cemetery land a “very important piece” of reconciliation.
“It was not a good place,” McKay said the day of the province’s announcement.
Kinew participates in a ceremony on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation after the Manitoba government announced it partnered with the City of Brandon to purchase the private campground land. (Jaison Empson/CBC)
His eldest sisters also attended the Brandon school for two years, while he is a survivor of the Fisher River and Birtle residential schools.
The United Church of Canada was one of three church organizations that operated the Brandon school during its long history. Later, McKay later made history as the first Indigenous person to lead that church.
He said he nearly left the church after an “awakening” that he had been colonized by it. Elders, who also “had some difficulties with the church,” encouraged him to stay and work within the system and be a part of helping it change, McKay said.
McKay would like to see more education in Manitoba schools around the residential school experience and have it localized to stories about the 18 schools that operated in the province.
Kinew, on Friday, agreed that would be a good idea and said much more is being done in schools now than in previous decades.
“How much did we learn about residential school in K-12 versus what a kid today learns? It’s night and day in terms of being so much more,” he said.
There is a need for those no longer in school to be educated as well, Kinew said.
“As we were preparing for Brandon … I was talking to some of my staff that I work with very closely — very smart people — and I pulled out the volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that documents the child deaths. People were shocked. They didn’t know [the number of deaths],” he said.
“So for sure there’s more needs to be done in the K-12 system, but I think there’s also a lot in the workplace, in churches, in sports, all the venues where we gather as Manitobans, where we need to keep this thing alive.
“The thing that we don’t want to happen is for this to fade from our living memory, and then we forget, and then maybe some of the the negative lessons we should have learned start to re-emerge.”
