The public square is supposed to correct itself. Journalists test claims; scholars test ideas. But in the Kamloops story—and in the culture around it—both systems blinked.
In my conversation with Frances Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor who was fired and later found to have been wrongfully terminated by an arbitrator (with issues still under appeal), we traced how two institutions—the media and the university—stopped asking hard questions exactly when it mattered most.
When Reporting Became Advocacy
Widdowson’s critique of the press is not subtle. “I think that the media is a huge part of the problem and it’s largely kind of advocacy journalism instead of the way journalism used to be”.
In practice, that shift looks like certainty where there should be caution.On Kamloops, she returns to one evidentiary hinge: no excavation.
“Excavations are the only way that you can make a determination as to whether there are remains there, because you can’t do it through ground-penetrating radar… You can’t do it through stories”.
Headlines told a completed tale; the underlying facts did not. Even the number—215—is contested in her account. “It wasn’t 215, because there was a mistake made by Sarah [Beaulieu]… 200—we get that GPR finding and everyone automatically went to ‘there’s 200 children buried in that apple orchard,’ which we shouldn’t have started at that point”.
Widdowson’s point is not that nothing happened; it’s that journalists collapsed the difference between preliminary indications and proven facts, and then failed to sustain skeptical follow-up.
“$12.1 million has been made available to do the excavations. The band has not done the excavations and they were supposed to have been done between 2021 and 2023”.
When money moves and outcomes don’t, she expects the press to keep pressing.
The “Denier” Label as Speech Policing
The media failure dovetails with a language shift inside and around universities, where labels do the work arguments once did.
“Saying denier is a … pejorative that is … really feeding into attempts to silence people and prevent … disagreement from occurring… It just seems to me to be an anti-intellectual move intent on creating fear and make people think twice about raising a criticism of what’s being argued”.
She distinguishes between disagreement about genocide as a legal standard and denial of atrocities: “I do think that what is [meant] is residential school genocide denial, which would make sense because that’s what the Holocaust denier label is about—if you deny the Holocaust as a genocide”. Her objection is the automatic moral conflation: use the term and the conversation ends.
Universities: From Inquiry to Ideology
If journalists too often amplified, universities—in Widdowson’s telling—narrowed.
“The difficulty became in 2014 when the university began to take political positions on things which gradually resulted in it becoming more and more difficult for me to make critical arguments about what the university had taken a position on”.
Then came 2020: “After the death of George Floyd that’s when the universities sort of fell apart in terms of their academic mission”. Inside her own case, she says the principle flipped from debate to doctrine: “It was stated in the arbitration hearing that I should not be reinstated at Mount Royal because I believe that there’s only two sexes and this … says that trans people don’t exist and that it denies their humanity”.
Whatever one’s stance on those issues, she argues the method was wrong: ideas were not being tested, they were being policed.
“There’s been a terrible corrosion of the universities… we should have been able to have conversations and evidence-based discussions about the residential schools and the Kamloops case in particular”.
Near the end of our conversation, her verdict tightens: “The universities… have behaved absolutely terribly. And the administration has got to take responsibility for what it’s done”.
What Evidence Looks Like
Widdowson advocates a simple tool from street epistemology: make claims falsifiable, assign degrees of certainty, and name what evidence would move you.
“You get people to state their degree of certainty about that and then figure out what evidence that they would need to become more certain or less certain”.
She applies it to Kamloops. On missing children: “In terms of parents saying that their child never came home from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, we don’t have one report of that happening”. On proof thresholds: if remains were unearthed, she would revise her view.
“I would move to the slightly disagree, or maybe I would even go to the neutral, because I would now say I have no idea what that’s about… then let people make the arguments… for me to be convinced one way or the other”.
These are not conclusions; they are conditions. The bigger claim is procedural: journalism and academia must protect the process that separates belief from fact.
Where Institutions Went Off the Rails
Taken together, her critique is less about a single story and more about habits:
Premature certainty (reporting preliminary signals as discoveries).
Moralized vocabulary that collapses debate (“denier”).
Institutional partisanship (universities taking positions, then punishing dissent).
Evidentiary drift (GPR hits treated as bodies; funding treated as proof of findings).
Each habit blurs the line between what we feel and what we can show. The result, as she frames it, is public policy built on assumptions and a campus culture built on taboos.
The Way Back
We won’t fix trust with better slogans. We’ll fix it with better standards.
For media, that means front-loading uncertainty, distinguishing hypotheses from findings, and tracking publicly funded promises to completion (or explaining why not). For universities, it means re-centralizing open inquiry: hosting adversarial events, protecting unpopular research, and evaluating claims on evidence, not affiliation.
Widdowson’s challenge is ultimately civic: the courage to separate grief from proof, to allow questions without exile, and to accept that truth often arrives last—after the headlines, after the hashtags, and after the first wave of certainty has broken.
If our institutions can relearn that discipline, they might recover the legitimacy they’ve traded for applause. And we might, finally, be able to carry out the work reconciliation actually requires: not obedience to a narrative, but fidelity to the truth.
Another freaking banger. Aaron, you are such an interesting mind. I have real chores to do. I can't just come here all day and read these thought provoking articles. Gah!