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Under Carney, Canada Is Cooling on Reconciliation

Three experts on the need to keep challenging denialism

Kimberly Murray is a lawyer who served as executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2010 to 2015. She was subsequently special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites from June 2022 until December 2024. She is Mohawk and a member of Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk Nation.

Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair teach Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. In this conversation, they speak with Murray about the shifting attitudes to truth and reconciliation under Prime Minister Mark Carney, about how that change is being felt by Indigenous communities, and about the rising tide of denialism. The interview has been edited for length.

Carleton and Sinclair: As we mark another Orange Shirt Day and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, how do you reflect on the past year? A lot has happened. Your office released its Final Report in October 2024. Many residential school teams, such as Williams Lake and Penelakut, have made interim announcements confirming additional deaths. The Fort Resolution team announced they’ve exhumed burials of five children. But government support for search teams has also dried up, and denialism and anti-Indigenous racism seem to be growing. As an expert and someone who’s been doing this work for a long time, where do you think we’re at a decade after the TRC’s Final Report?

Murray: It’s very troubling to me that communities are being left hanging and wondering whether they’re going to continue to receive funding from the federal government to do the investigations that are, and have been, happening across the country. Some are far along in their investigations, and others are at the early stages. To be cut off at whatever stage is a big problem. I did have some hope at the time of the 2025 federal election, because in the platform of the Liberal government, they said they would continue to support the investigations for missing children and unmarked burials.

But, as of today, we do not know what that’s going to look like in the near future. As I said in my Final Report, I feel that Canada has legal, ethical, and moral obligations to continue supporting communities as they search for the missing and disappeared children. Until we get that commitment, I think that Canada, as a government, is just causing more trauma to survivors and communities.

About truth and reconciliation, I find it very difficult to understand where we are as a country—federally, provincially, and institutionally—with the implementation of the Calls to Action. I blame that on the fact that Canada dragged its heels on implementing the National Council for Reconciliation Call to Action (Call to Action 53). It’s now implementing it. But here we are, ten, almost eleven, years later, and we still don’t have the entity created; only the inaugural board has been selected. We’re waiting for the entity to be created so that they can be the oversight to the ninety-four—or the other ninety-three—Calls to Action.

But I don’t want to take away from the progress that has been made. I think there’s been implementation on the ground at local levels that isn’t being captured by oversight watchdog agencies or organizations.

Carleton and Sinclair: It’s interesting you bring up the election—that might be a good way to transition to denialism. In one of the last budgets that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tabled, there was funding specifically allocated to challenging residential school denialism. Now, like any budget, it was a promise down the road when his political future was far from certain. But it was put into the budget and identified as an issue that was harming the progress of truth and reconciliation.

When Carney took over as prime minister, he was being questioned on the campaign trail about whether he was going to continue to make progress on these issues. He didn’t sit down with Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), and he was dodging the issue for quite a while. Eventually, he did say he and the Liberal Party were going to continue to make........

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