What exactly is residential school "denialism"? "As best I can tell," Sheila Gunn Reid said on this week's episode of The Gunn Show, "it's people asking for proof of claims of genocide."

Her guest, independent researcher and journalist Michelle Stirling, said activists are trying to elevate the many sad cases at residential schools to the level of the Holocaust, a deliberate campaign that murdered six million Jews and millions of others.

"Setting up residential schools to teach children the skills they needed for the modern world is not equivalent to setting up gas chambers and death camps," she said. To her mind, the comparison is itself a form of Holocaust denial.

She pointed to the 215 pairs of shoes placed on steps across Canada after the Kamloops claim, which she called a disgraceful imitation of the shoes displayed at Auschwitz. "The shoes at Auschwitz belonged to real people who were murdered by the Nazis," she said.

Stirling also took aim at NDP MP Leah Gazan, who told Parliament the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal has accused Canada of genocide. The tribunal held hearings in Montreal in May on missing children and unmarked graves.

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Stirling said researcher Nina Green has shown none of the evidence presented actually related to that task, and that the tribunal's report doesn't accuse Canada of genocide. "The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal is only an opinion tribunal," she said. "It's not any kind of a formal court."

She questioned the timeline, too.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent nearly seven years and $70 million travelling the country, yet Kamloops never raised its claim. When it did in 2021, Ottawa accepted it immediately, lowering flags and cancelling Canada Day celebrations. "There was no investigation. There has been no forensic evidence offered," she said. "There's been no charges and no trial."

In her view, Gazan's 2022 motion declaring residential schools a genocide, passed without any conviction, is being used as proof simply because Parliament voted for it.

Stirling sees something larger at play.

Within a month of the Kamloops claim, she noted, UNDRIP passed the Senate, and a day after it received royal assent, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Belarus cited Kamloops at the UN Human Rights Council to accuse Canada of human rights abuses. She compared the confusion to the psychological warfare described by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, in which people are flooded with information yet can't reach sensible conclusions.

Meanwhile, she said, people are afraid to speak up. Senator Lynn Beyak was cancelled; Dr. Frances Widdowson lost her job at Mount Royal University.

"This is an issue that's tearing Canada apart," Stirling said.