The Ethical and Journalistic Lapses of the Brandon Sun

By Michelle Stirling ©2026

On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, the Brandon Sun published an editorial titled, “No Room on Board for Unchastened Apologist”, which shows how low Canada’s journalists have fallen.

Does federal government funding influence the editorial opinions at the Brandon Sun? Fair question.

Perhaps driven by government funding, perhaps by spite, perhaps by a burning desire to speak up for Indigenous people seen to be vulnerable and abused, no matter what the motivation, the Brandon Sun editorial staff commit a crime. A few crimes, in just a few words.

They deny James McCrae the right of presumption of innocence.

They defame him as a ‘residential school denier’.

They blood libel Canada, our own once-great nation, as being guilty of genocide.

They blindly accept unsworn, unverified statements of people whose childhood recollections were recounted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as if fact.

They ignore the fact that, as Manitoban and former Indian Residential School student Tomson Highway wrote, upon the release of the TRC reports, “You may have heard stories from 7,000 witnesses in the process that were negative,” he adds. “But what you haven’t heard are the 7,000 reports that were positive stories.”

The Brandon Sun editor(s) violate all journalistic standards of their own FP Newspapers Inc., specifically the organization’s own statement:

To be ethical is to know the difference between right and wrong, and to do the right thing. If there is any uncertainty, before taking any action, we must ask ourselves the following questions:

• is it legal?

• is it fair?

• is it right?

• would FP’s reputation be diminished if it became generally known?

Is it legal, fair or right to personally attack James McCrae in this way?

Consider that the person the Brandon Sun is condemning is James McCrae, former Justice Minister of Manitoba. Fundamental principles of rule of law and human rights include freedom of expression, presumption of innocence when accused of any crime, and a right to a fair trial – not a public hanging in the press.

Surely the former Justice Minister of Manitoba, James McCrae, is well aware of these principles, which have been broadly denied all Canadians, in respect of the diverse views on Indian Residential Schools. This is likely why he continues to speak up and to write articles that expose significant breaches of due diligence on the Indian Residential School file, particularly by bodies like the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), which has been funded for millions of tax dollars to properly record and present our history to all of us.

Apparently the Brandon Sun editors are not aware of these fundamentals of rule of law as they make every effort to publicly shred James McCrae’s reputation while he, on the other hand, is making every effort to do the due diligence not done by tax-funded groups like the NCTR. James McCrae is doing the job that journalists used to do, investigating issues, alerting the taxpaying public of these errors, and ameliorating the terrible blood libels against Christian and Catholic churches and thousands of dedicated former Indian Residential School employees by providing important historical context and evidence.

Perhaps if the editorial board at the Brandon Sun had done their research on dissenting views, and if they followed the the Canadian Press journalistic standards of structural ethics their organization claims to align with, they would be aware that there are many discrepancies in the development of the TRC and the reports. A good place to start is with historian JR Miller’s statement that: At no time in the history of residential schooling in Canada were parents “compelled to send their children to residential schools.”

Likewise, the Brandon Sun denounces McCrae having questioned Brandon City Council’s resolution that would have recognized Canadian Indian Residential Schools as genocide. Does the Brandon Sun not realize that genocide is a specific crime of international proportions that is not decided by a vote of a local city council, but by a full, fair trial at the International Criminal Court?

But before you have such a trial, you have to charge someone with the crime. And then present evidence.

So far, we’ve only had public hangings in the press. That’s not genocide. Surely a journo should understand that.

As I have argued against Sean Carleton’s persistent claim of Indian Residential School genocide, such a charge is not decided by a vote in the House of Commons, by a word from a travel-weary Pope, nor by the TRC’s invented term “cultural genocide”

An important book that reveals many aspects of the TRC gone awry is, “Truth and Indignation” by law professor and anthropologist Ronald Niezen. He and his team researched the TRC during its process and found many shocking anomalies. For instance, the missing children project was started and conducted in secret.

As well, two women the TRC hired to conduct interviews with former staff, clergy, or their descendants and priests and nuns were told their budget had been cut from $100,000 to $10,000 and that none of their interviews would be transcribed. That’s out of a budget that ultimately reached $70 million for the TRC.

Why is that such a critical missing piece?

Most of the people whose recollections were gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission went to Indian Residential Schools long after the churches had relinquished management. The government of Canada ran the schools, most of them from 1969 onward to the last closure in 1997. In most cases, the local Indian band and council operated the schools, and the schools were staffed with many Indigenous administrators, caregivers, cooks and maintenance people. There may have been a priest on staff to assist with administration or clerical services, or a nun working in the kitchen to provide supervision and management.

That’s it. How could these two people commit genocide? Why would their Indigenous colleagues let them?

Thus, the former staff and administrators could have provided important historical context from an ADULT perspective at the time.

For instance, many people are aware of the sad fate of Charlie Wenjack, who died as a runaway from Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School. How many people know that former students used to write grateful letters to the administrator and his wife; they referred to them as “Mom and Dad” and signed their letters “Love….” That’s the evidence that investigative journalist Robert MacBain uncovered when he interviewed the descendants of the school’s administrators. He read the letters and wrote the book “The Lonely Death of an Ojibway Boy”.

But MacBain only had the budget of a retired journo, while the false Charlie Wenjack story (which maligns Catholic priests and nuns in the video, book and songs) had the PR machine and public stage of the late Gord Downie, the tax funded CBC and the Gord Downey and Chanie Wenjack Fund which received financial support from the tax subsidized charity, TIDES (now MakeWay) Foundation. The “Gord and Chanie” fund now extort thousands of dollars in reconciliation expiation from corporations and cities across Canada to set up ‘legacy rooms’ to promote a lie. A specific part of the lie is that there were never any Catholic priests or nuns at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School as shown in “The Secret Path”.

Ceclia Jeffrey IRS was run by Presbyterians!

And an Indigenous administrator was running the school when Charlie took off one afternoon with two friends to go and visit one of the boy’s uncles who lived nearby in the woods. The tragic story unfolded from there.

According to MacBain, there is no evidence that Charlie Wenjack was ever sexually assaulted at the school – but that is what is being taught in 65,000 classrooms across North America. Children are being forced into rituals of penitence over a lie – to ‘Walk for Wenjack’, to light seven matches, or to take the “215+ Pledge.” I bring this example forward because MacBain’s background is journalism, just to support and validate McCrae’s efforts in trying to dig up the truth, pun intended.

Based on the editorial, the Brandon Sun would apparently think that the foregoing is heresy. Any true journalistic organization would be busy ferreting out the facts that people like James McCrae and Robert MacBain have found. In fact, that was supposed to be the job of the TRC. That is also supposed to be the job of the NCTR – making the historic facts available to the general public. It is restricting access instead.

The TRC published half a truth, and half a truth is a whole lie.

In the latter days of the Indian Residential School system, the bands and council used the schools for child welfare cases. The cohort of people who told their many tragic personal recollections to the TRC were largely children of families that were destitute or neglectful or the children were orphans. Some 30% of all Indian Residential School students were orphans. No wonder impressions of deaths, graves or missing people would have been imprinted upon their frightened minds and potentially projected on to the school that ‘took them away’ from their deceased or dysfunctional parents, for their own survival.

The American Psychological Association asserts, and most judges and lawyers know, that eye witness reports, though compelling, are often inaccurate, particularly in respect of Historic Sexual Assault.

Both the Brandon Sun and the TRC are wrong about the Indian Residential Schools purpose being Canada’s attempt to “kill the Indian, save the man”. An American said that, it was never Canadian policy.

Indian Residential Schools were set up with the free, prior, informed consent, review and approval of key Western Indian Chiefs, as outlined in historian Don Smith’s “Chief’s Journey.” On the advice of a Mohawk surveyor named Thomas Green, Sir John A. Macdonald brought Chief Red Crow and Chief Crowfoot, among others, to the east by train. Imagine their surprise at the scope of urban-industrial-agricultural life in the developed East of Canada. They toured the Mohawk Institute and were given presentations by students in English and in Mohawk. They understood that education of this kind was the way forward for their people, now on the brink of starvation with the decimation of the buffalo.

Chief Red Crow sent his own adopted son Shot Close to the Dunbow Industrial School; Frank Red Crow, as he was renamed, went on to be an excellent farmer and rancher and Chief of his band. Chief Red Crow, the elder, saw the separation from the family at Indian Residential School, similar to that of a brave on a hunt – he must go away to fetch the prize; food for the family, or in the case of the school, education and skills for survival in the new world.

The Brandon Sun quotes Duncan Campbell Scott, who oversaw the operation of Indian Residential Schools between 1913 and 1932, as if there would be something bad about Indians being absorbed into the body politic and the Department of Indian Affairs dissolved. Scott also said, ““I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone…”.

I wonder if he was aware of John LeCaine, the great-grandfather of Leah Gazan. LeCaine was the child of Lakota people who came to Canada from the USA, seeking asylum after their massacre of Lt. Col. Custer and the 7^th Cavalry. It is unclear if he was the illegitimate child of North West Mounted Police officer, William Edward Archibald LeCaine (like his sister, Alice) or the son of Lakota man, Okute. The full story is too long to tell here (follow the link above), but suffice to say that John LeCaine, after attending the Regina Industrial School for seven years, became a successful farmer and rancher. He was a devout Catholic, helped build the local chapel, and ultimately became a writer of his people’s history. He was an independent Indian, indeed, a settler.

John LeCaine Okuse Sica’s obituary - great-grandfather of Leah Gazan.

Scott saw Indian people as capable of leading their own lives without any government intervention or race-specific support, as long as they had some education which the government was willing to provide. Scott was a poet, a contemporary of E. Pauline Johnson, with whom he had once shared a stage for poetry readings. She was a capable, independent woman who retained her Mohawk heritage, celebrated it on stage and in her work, and also was perfectly at home in mainstream society.

Thus, I think the quote the Brandon Sun employs to try and denigrate the Indian Residential School system is misused. What would Scott think today?

Today, Canadians are on the hook for about $60 billion in payouts to 1.8 million Indigenous people in Canada. Some people, like Kimberly Murray, are claiming that additional reparations must also be paid for the phantom, no-name genocide. Is it not time to implement Duncan Scott’s wisdom? That native people should stand alone as regular citizens of Canada. The hand-up afforded by the Canadian government 150 years ago under the Indian Act has become nothing more than a hand-out, without end, much of it enriching lawyers and elites, rather than getting to the poor on reserves.

In closing, the Brandon Sun takes a shot at James McCrae saying, “But we must question the wisdom of trusting the continued education of our children to an individual who has gone to great lengths to downplay the harms caused by the Indian Residential School system.”

Should we not be questioning the great harms done to Canadian society and our children by the TRC’s half-hearted story, the distorted Downie-Wenjack tale, the unproven claim of ‘215’ children, allegedly murdered by priests and nuns, buried by classmates who were forced to dig shallow graves under cover of night in the old apple orchard of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School? Canada’s mass murder. Not even a police investigation into it. The alleged site of the crime turned over to the custody of the alleged victims. This is unheard of.

Across Canada, millions of little children are forced to wear orange hair shirts as penitence for crimes that have never been proven except by the headlines of irresponsible media like the Brandon Sun and the New York Times. Even the Globe & Mail, chief purveyor of the Kamloops blood libel, had the decency to recently recant and admit how irresponsible their reporting had been. The article was fairly titled: “There is no reconciliation without truth.”

Millions of Canadian children are forced to tie ‘215’ orange ribbons on school fences every fall for ‘Truth’ and Reconciliation Day – commemorating something that so far has not been shown to be true at all. In all likelihood, they are commemorating the 2000 feet of septic trenches that underlie the area of the alleged unmarked graves of the ‘215’.

The Brandon Sun is said to align with Canadian Press journalistic standards, so here’s one they should henceforth live by:

Investigate fully before transmitting any story or identifying any individual in a story where there is the slightest reason for doubt. When in doubt cut it out.

Aside from maligning the reputation of James McCrae, the Brandon Sun also denigrates the decades-long work of thousands of former Indian Residential School workers, many who are still alive; many now fear for their lives, thanks to the rampant media rage against the schools and staff. See Bernice Logan’s letter below, showing that from the get-go, mainstream media has only told half a truth to the public about Indian Residential Schools, and thus, a whole lie.

My question is this. Having used their power of the press to harm the reputation of James McCrae with their jumble of false accusations and shoddy research, will the Brandon Sun have the journalistic integrity of ‘right of reply’ - to offer James McCrae the courtesy of publishing a response from him?

We wait.

Image licensed from Adobe Stock. Text added.