MALCOLM: Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.
And exclusive sneak-peak of Candice's forward from the new book 'Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong'
Read Candice Malcolm’s forward from the new book Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong. Dead Wrong is a follow-up to Grave Error, published by True North in late 2023. Get your copy from Amazon today!
Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.
How else could we make sense of the moral panic produced from a half-baked report coming from a small Indian Band in Central British Columbia in the spring of 2021? In response, the country lost its mind. Following reports of 215 “unmarked graves” at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School, the supposedly trusted sources of our society – journalists, elected officials, academics and so-called experts – reported fiction as fact, without doing any due diligence or research into the still unproven and questionable claims of mass graves and secret midnight burials of hundreds of deceased children.
A failure of this magnitude doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s built over time as those who profess to speak the truth deliver deception, doublespeak, and misinformation – all in the name of addressing some grievance, advancing an agenda, and creating a narrative.
The only conclusion we can now draw is that our country is not what it should be, not what it was.
There are a myriad of complicated reasons to explain our clear downward trajectory – institutional capture, a hard-left consensus among political and cultural elites (driven in large part by government-funded journalists and the state broadcaster pushing woke propaganda), a large and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles growth and
innovation, institutions built upon a moral code that became unfashionable, and so on.
Canada has become a feminist country that proudly discriminates against men and diminishes the role of mothers. It has become a post-national country that loathes its founders and openly discriminates against individuals based on skin colour. It isn’t just post-Christian, it’s anti-Christian – evident from the treatment of Evangelical prayer leader Sean Feucht, the coordinated attacks against him in the summer of 2025 and the cancellation of tour stops across the country, not to mention total disinterest and cover-up of the 120+ churches that have been decimated and destroyed in the wake of the unmarked graves fiasco.
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed our country fall from a functional system, into something almost unrecognizable.
The Canada I grew up in was safe, stable and secure. We knew our neighbours, we trusted institutions and didn’t worry too much about politics. Being Canadian meant something. We had a community, an identity, a shared purpose. Most of us believed in upward mobility and the Canadian dream: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have the same – or dare I say better – opportunities and quality of life than your parents.
This is clearly no longer the case for most Canadians under the age of 45, and that is a major problem for all of us.
I came across a simple social graph by William Meijer that clearly explains what has happened better than anything else I’ve seen. You could apply this to countries, companies and even personal relationships.
Simply put: kindness got in the way of truth.
Meijer writes the accompanying caption: “An extreme commitment to the truth makes relationships acutely dysfunctional but systems chronically functional (think Elon Musk).
An extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional but systems chronically dysfunctional (think Sweden, UK).”
Canada perhaps represents the “kind dysfunction” better than any other place.
When I look at this chart, I think of the Big Lie told during the Covid years. The use of propaganda and the coordinated attacks on free speech against anyone who reported the truth or asked the wrong questions. My media company, True North, had countless social media strikes and bans for simply reporting on true events like vaccine injuries and the harms of school closures. I was called a conspiracy theorist and compared to Alex Jones in a Foreign Policy report written by a prominent Canadian journalist for merely mentioning the Lab Leak theory on my show in the spring of 2020.
The Covid Lies placed Canada onto a downward spiral with one “kind lie” after another — Diversity is our Strength, Believe all Women, Men can become Women, Banning “Hate Speech”, Elbows Up, and certainly the most malicious and damaging “kind lie” ever told: that of the 215 Unmarked Graves.
It’s hard to exaggerate just how damaging this lie – and the incredible aftermath of media propaganda that took on a life of its own – has been and will be for the future of our country. How can we have reconciliation if a significant portion of the population thinks the country is genocidal and illegitimate? How can we correct the lies when a strange consensus of elites believes that kindness and empathy are more important than facts and truth?
Fortunately, there is a way to escape the doom spiral of Meijer’s graph. It’s called the Truth Nuke.
Graph creator Hunter Ash wrote the following in response:
“The reason it’s incredibly hard to break out of a “kind lie” doom loop is because the longer it’s gone on, the more unkindness is needed to get back on track. And the fact that you’re in this situation to begin with probably means your culture will hate it.”
You could certainly argue that our culture did indeed hate our first book in this series, Grave Error. Just look at the reaction in Quesnel, B.C (detailed in Chapter 1). And as much as the powers that be – politicians, the media, Band leaders, University administrators, etc. – hated our Truth Nuke, it worked.
People were desperate for the truth. After being gaslit for all these years, Canadians wanted to hear the other side of the story. They were desperate for tough questions, skepticism, counter-points and the facts. That is, after all, the role of a functioning media in a liberal democracy – something the CBC has long abandoned.
Journalists ask tough questions, no matter how difficult and unpopular it may be.
The reality is that in May of 2021, when the bombshell report of the “unmarked graves” came out, there wasn’t a journalist in the country – in the world – willing to fill this role. So I did.
I was hardly a working journalist at the time. I began writing a regular column in the Toronto Sun in 2013 and was promoted to a national columnist with a syndicated column across the Postmedia chain in 2015. I had also started True North and launched a news podcast during COVID. In the Spring of 2021, however, I was on maternity leave with a six-month-old baby and a two-year-old toddler. I was basically a stay-at-home mum who became fixated on the overt lies being told to Canadians, so I decided to say something.
After consulting with my husband, my team at True North, a few very trusted friends in politics and the media, and after praying for wisdom and guidance, I decided to release a report showing my skepticism. It was the very first media report in the world to question the narrative, released a few days after the initial bombshell and in the early days of the extreme moral panic.
Many on my own team warned against it. “There is a consensus that Residential Schools were wrong” I was told. “We’re talking about dead kids” someone else said, “there’s no room for a contrarian take here.”
But I was beyond skeptical. I was baffled at how incomplete and empty the claims were. There was no report. There were no names. There were no bodies. The accusations were incredibly vague. Many of the worst claims in the initial news release were quotes from community members based on memories, not actual evidence.
It seemed like an obvious unsubstantiated accusation. And yet, the entire legacy media presented the story to the public as fact. As if the bodies had been dug up. As if the 215 children had simply vanished in the past and were suddenly discovered in the ground.
This of course was not true, not even close. And so I released my first of many reports – in the Sun papers and on my podcast – where I carefully and politely asked some pointed questions. I raised concerns about ground penetrating radar, the unreleased report, the lack of details and information about this report and its authors, and holes in the story more broadly. I also raised important contradictions from legacy media coverage – including a report in the Globe and Mail stating that the “unmarked graves” in Cowessess, Saskatchewan were actually part of a community graveyard with both native and English Canadians buried there. In other words, it was a formerly marked graveyard, not some kind of evidence of mass graves and genocide.
The backlash to my reporting was fast and furious – I got into a yelling match with one of my editors and he quit a few days later. A board member unceremoniously resigned and copied the partners at her law firm to tell them how angry and upset she was over my reporting. I lost friends, colleagues publicly condemned me, my inbox was inundated with hate mail and I eventually lost my column in the Toronto Sun.
Truth be told, I didn’t mind. I knew I was right. My loyalty lies with God, my family and of course, the truth.
And eventually, the truth did come out. One prominent Canadian journalist after another – Jonathan Kay, Terry Glavin, JJ McCollough, and finally, big American voices like Barry Weiss and Matt Walsh – all amplified our message: this story is not true.
This culminated in the publication of Grave Error, a wonderful initiative from Professor Tom Flanagan and Dr. Chris Champion, as well as other incredible voices for truth like Hymie Rubenstein, Frances Widdowson, Barbara Kay, Jonathan Kay and Conrad Black that I was pleased to be a part of. True North proudly published the book, helped with the marketing, and watched it quickly become a national best-seller.
It was our Truth Nuke.
It was our attempt to put Canada back on the path of being a functioning system once again. I firmly believe that we took this from a 90/10 losing issue in the minds of Canadians to being a 50/50 issue today with the wind at our back. I hope the second edition will take us further in rescuing our country from dysfunction and reasserting the truth.
Canada has serious problems that will require the dedicated efforts of every generation to restore. We need Truth Nukes in every area of our lives where kind lies have superseded the uncomfortable but necessary truths. The authors in these books have taken great personal risks to their own careers, lives and reputations – as I did in 2021 – but they do so for good reason. The truth is our guiding light and the only thing that will save our country.
Be unkind. Tell the truth. Canada is worth fighting for.
Candice Malcolm
Journalist, entrepreneur, wife and mother of 4
Founder of True North and Juno News
Check out the full table of contents for Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong, available today through Amazon.
Thank you for your courage!
Will the Globe and Mail ever answer for what they have done? Globe and Mail- “A beacon of light in what is often a dark media landscape…”
Destroying Lives. Destroying Canada. https://open.substack.com/pub/michellestirlingg/p/globe-and-mail-a-beacon-of-light?r=f96qu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false