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More than 110 churches were vandalised and some reduced to ashes in the moral panic that swept Canada over the fake mass grave scandal.

After four years of extensive searches, up to $214 million spent and no bodies found, the Trudeau government has at last turned off the funding tap for efforts to locate alleged unmarked mass graves at Indigenous residential schools.

In mid-February, Canada quietly halted funding for two key organisations tasked with the search for unmarked graves, according to the CBC.

Those committees were formed on the premise that over 1,000 Indigenous children had been secretly buried in unmarked graves at religious-run, government-funded residential schools across Canada.

But after spending millions on the futile search, the Trudeau government’s quiet reversal has raised pressing questions about the legitimacy of the original claims and accountability for lawmakers who approved the taxpayer-funded cash splash.

Canada spent $216M to find the graves of indigenous kids hidden at churches. The excavations are over. 0 bodies. pic.twitter.com/dtHrnVxjP4

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 25, 2025

Canada’s Mass Grave Moral Panic

The residential school graves controversy first erupted in May 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of 215 suspected graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, detected using ground-penetrating radar.

This was soon followed by reports of 751 anomalies in Saskatchewan and 160 more in British Columbia.

The claims triggered a national reckoning: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags on federal buildings lowered to half mast for six months, the longest period in Canadian history.

Pope Francis made a pilgrimage all the way to Alberta, where he gave a lengthy apology, saying he was “deeply sorry” for “the evil committed by so many Christians”.

Canada Day was effectively cancelled. Instead, protesters across the nation tore down statues — including monuments to Captain Cook, Queen Victoria, and then-reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth II.

Demonstrators toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Winnipeg this afternoon during rallies honouring the children discovered in unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools over the past month. pic.twitter.com/Zx0aqPGcOW

— APTN News (@APTNNews) July 2, 2021

The alleged controversy rippled as far as Australia, where ABC News used taxpayer funds to produce a slew of news reports and a 30-minute documentary.

Soon, the outrage had turned destructive, with at least 112 churches vandalised or set ablaze — many of which, ironically, served Indigenous congregations on Indigenous land.

The attacks were defended by leading Canadian figures as a justified if visceral response to historical pain.

A former top advisor of Trudeau’s called the acts of arson “understandable”. The head of a British Columbia civil liberties group tweeted, “burn it all down”, as did the Chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch. A high-profile lawyer even called for “residential school denialism” to be added to Canada’s Criminal Code.

No Remains Found Despite Extensive Efforts

However, less than a year after the 2021 Kamloops announcement, the narrative began to unravel.

By early 2022, no human remains had been excavated at the site, despite the initial claim of 215 “suspected graves.” Anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who led the ground-penetrating radar survey, later adjusted her estimate to 200 “probable burials” and also conceded that the technology couldn’t differentiate graves from anomalies like tree roots or soil disruptions.

Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus at the University of Montreal, detailed in The Dorchester Review that these findings stemmed from “depressions and abnormalities” in an apple orchard, not exhumed bodies.

By September 2023, a four-week excavation near Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba — the third such effort — also found no human remains. Previous digs in Saskatchewan and British Columbia had similarly drawn blanks.

Historian Dr. Scott Hamilton, who researched residential school cemeteries from 2013 to 2015, has explained that high death rates from diseases like tuberculosis, coupled with lean government funding, often resulted in simple burials with wooden markers that decayed over time — not clandestine mass graves.

Canada Reckons With Its Past — And Future

The residential school system, operated by religious groups like the Catholic Church from the 1840s to the 1960s and later by the government until 1996, often forcibly assimilated Indigenous children. Some suffered physical and sexual abuse.

“Canadians deserve to know the truth,” Canada’s Federal Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has since told reporters about the alleged scandal.

“Conservatives will always stand in favour of historical accuracy,” he said, while acknowledging that the residential schools involved “an appalling abuse of power by the state and by the church” at the time.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation in January of this year, but will remain in office until a successor is appointed by the Liberal Party.

An Abacus poll taken last week shows Poilievre’s Conservatives enjoying a 19-point lead heading into the next federal election, likely to take place in October.