Mark Carney and His Dad: Canada’s Residential Schools Controversy

by David Solway (February 2026)

On July 19, 2022, the Canadian government set up the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials to investigate the alleged abuse and murder of Indian children by Christian missionaries and school teachers between 1880 and 1996. National fury erupted in 2015 with the claim that 215 burial sites had been discovered in the apple orchard behind the Kamloops Indian Residential School by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scans. The monostory of indigenous suffering and “settler” guilt was now fixed in public memory. Predictably, the allegation proved to be false.

An essay by Nina Green in The Dorchester Review, two seminal books on the subject, Grave Error and Dead Wrong, edited by historians Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, Jim McMurtry’s The Scarlet Lesson, and the fiction-debunking documentary film Making a Killing, reveal that the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc (Kamloops) travesty is likely the greatest hoax in all of Canadian history. After three years of searching for bodies, at the cost of $216 million, not a single set of human remains has been found.

Anyone who disputes the accusation of residential malfeasance is now tarred as a “denialist,” and some MPs are lobbying to make skepticism in the affair a criminal offense. NDP legislator Leah Gazan has proposed Bill C-413, an Act to amend the  Criminal Code to indict those “denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada.” An entire industry has been created to further the spurious narrative.

Over a hundred churches have been burned to the ground in acts of venomous mob reprisal. A national consensus that genocide had been committed was now solidly established. It made no difference to an inflamed citizenry that not a single body had been discovered nor a single Kamloops grave site excavated. The area is considered “sacred ground” and is surrounded by a white fence.

Now it emerges that current Liberal prime minister Mark Carney’s father was professionally involved with these conventionally hated Indigenous schools as the principal of an Indian day school and superintendent of school programmes.

Robert J. Carney’s unforgiveable sin was his use of the phrase “culturally retarded children,” which in a 1965 CBC interview he defined in the context of the Northwest Territories as “a child from a Native background who for various reasons has not been in regular attendance in school. He’s from a language background other than English and who is behind in school, say three or four years.”

He goes on to state that “In many centres in southern Canada, the subculture groups, say in the working-class area of a large city, you would have children who you would call culturally retarded. In the United States among negro groups we have many examples of cultural retardation, and programs that have been developed to meet their needs, to try and upgrade their skills, and bring them into contact with the dominant culture.” The accurate reference to black children has been wiped from the transcript, but can still be found in the recorded interview, at the beginning of this video here and below.

In so febrile and euphemistic a culture as ours has become, certain critical allusions can no longer be made, no matter how true, especially involving blacks, Muslims, and Native people. The fear of being accused of bigotry, however falsely, transcends the commitment to speaking truth.

In the story published by the CBC regarding the 1965 interview with Robert Carney, readers and viewers are warned that “this story contains outdated language and discusses physical and sexual abuse at residential schools. Today, it’s an interview some may find jarring.” We are witnessing a terrified network of eviscerated prigs and dandiprats performing their evasive jitterbug. It is hard to conceive of them as real people rather than politically correct marionettes jiggling on a set of ideological strings. They are a symptom of everything that is wrong with our culture.

Robert Carney does not seem in any way bigoted or prejudiced. He explained apropos his wards that “We want them to not forget their origins, or not to forget their backgrounds, and to instill in them a sense of pride and a sense of belonging: that the culture from which they come is a good culture.” In The Scarlet Lesson, Jim McMurtry, who was fired from his teaching job for questioning the collective hysteria, reveals that Robert Carney was his thesis advisor. He quotes his mentor to the effect that “Aboriginal residential schools always played a major role in caring for children in need.”

Nonetheless, Robert Carney understood that if his students were to prosper and thrive, they would need to adjust to the mainstream culture, an official objective followed by Confederation poet and Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs between 1879 and 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott. Like Scott, Carney senior did not believe his students were psychologically retarded, but for one reason or another they had not mastered the attitudes and aptitudes, proficiencies in language and math, and functional capacities that would have enabled them to enjoy social and economic success in the larger community.

Carney told the interviewer: “We want them to be able to read. We want them to be able to speak English. We want them to be able to do the various operations in arithmetic. We want them to know about the world. We want them to know about the world of science. We want them to have the opportunity of expression in music and art. We want them to learn various skills in physical education and so on.”

He did not deny that physical and sexual abuse had taken place. In a 1991 study, Robert Carney interviewed 240 former residential school students. “There is no doubt whatsoever that they have been scarred by what was done to them or by what they had witnessed,” he admitted. Atrocities did occur. But there was another side to the story as well. “A number of interviewees expressed positive comments about their experiences in residential schools and hostels, while others deplored what they described as the excessive attention given to negative incidents related to these institutions,” he wrote to the Edmonton Journal. In fact, many graduates expressed gratitude towards the Residential School experience, as evidenced by volumes like Glecia Bear’s Our Grandmothers’ Lives As Told in Their Own Words, which support Robert Carney’s argument.

As Chief of School Programmes for the Northwest Territories, Carney Sr. was sharply critical of the 1996 Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples for giving only “a slanted account of these institutions.” The schools “are invariably cast in a negative light.” Indeed, according to scholars writing in Dead Wrong, archival evidence “paints a mainly positive picture of what life was like there.”

“Residential schools, flawed though they were, were there to educate indigenous children,” writes retired judge Brian Giesbrecht. “The thousands of people who worked in that system—like Robert Carney—were not monsters, but ordinary, decent Canadians. Those trying to stifle political debate in Canada to further their own agendas cannot be allowed to do so.”

Obviously, Mark Carney’s dad is not to be blamed or denounced or excused for his participation in the school network. He was a good man and an honest administrator who believed in the Residential Schools’ programs and commitments. Naturally, Mark Carney has duly repudiated his father’s defence of residential schools. “I love my father, but I don’t share those views,” he said. Carney fils went on to assert that the demands of “truth and reconciliation” require everyone to publicly profess that the very complicated history of residential schools was entirely negative.

There can be no doubt that this is a creed that is both inimical to reconciliation and as far from the truth as one can travel. It also dishonors the father’s word and integrity. Carney Jr’s disclaimer is to be expected since the man seems utterly devoid of both filial respect and ethical substance.

Mark Carney has not finished his work of continuing the cultural travesty in which his government is implicated. In a new development, it turns out (cf. the National Review, the Catholic Herald, and the Western Standard) that Carney’s Liberal government has quietly closed down the inquiry into alleged mass murder and the search for mass graves of Indigenous children on the campuses of Canada’s residential schools. “Ottawa has sealed all progress reports connected to the federally funded search for the alleged graves,” in the words of the Western Standard. Data is not even available from the Freedom of Information Act. This is the “white fence” in the sphere of legislation, erected “in order to draw limits around what may and may not be said,” as Dead Wrong concludes.

The Liberals are, as always, embroiled in their own deceptive practices. Mark Carney’s profoundly compromised and hypocritical administration is obviously good at rendering the transparent opaque. I do not think the father would have been proud of the son.

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David Solway’s latest books are Profoundly Superficial: Observations on a Net-Zero Culture and Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.

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