The $321 Million Question: No Graves Found, But the Money Keeps Flowing

In May 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected 215 "children" buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The announcement ricocheted around the world. Flags were lowered to half-mast. Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II were toppled. Churches were vandalized across the country. Parliament held a moment of silence. And the federal government, within months, committed $321.4 million for residential school grave searches across Canada.

What has that $321.4 million found? As of February 2025: zero confirmed human remains at Kamloops. Not one.

That is the story Dallas Brodie — MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena — set out to tell. And it's a story that cost her her political career in one party and launched her into building another.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Ground-penetrating radar is a legitimate archaeological tool. It is also widely misunderstood by the public and, it appears, deliberately misrepresented in the political fallout of 2021. GPR does not detect human remains. It detects anomalies — subsurface disturbances that could be soil disruption, root systems, utility lines, historical construction, or any number of other features common to land that has been occupied and developed for decades.

The 215 "children" were never confirmed children. They were anomalies. And the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc band itself came to acknowledge this — formally referring to the detections as "anomalies" rather than confirmed burials in communications as of May 2024, three years after the announcement that shook the world.

None of this is to dismiss the documented history of residential schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent years compiling evidence of over 4,100 deaths at these institutions — a number that represents genuine suffering, genuine loss, and genuine historical crimes. That history is real, and it deserves honest acknowledgment and honest accounting.

The question is not whether residential schools caused suffering. They did. The question is whether specific grave claims are being forensically verified before hundreds of millions of public dollars are committed and spent. The answer, so far, appears to be no.

Making a Killing: The Documentary

Dallas Brodie produced Making a Killing, released in December 2025. The film — available at makingakilling.ca — does what investigative journalism is supposed to do: follow the money, ask who benefits, and demand evidence before declaration.

The documentary cost approximately $650,000 in BC Conservative caucus research funds — public money used for what Brodie argues is legitimate public interest research into government spending. It maps the flow of the $321.4 million federal commitment: which organizations received funding, what accountability mechanisms exist (spoiler: few), and what the searches have actually produced.

Those are not hostile questions. They are the questions any responsible journalist or legislator should be asking whenever the federal government writes a cheque for $321 million. That they proved career-ending for Brodie within the BC Conservative party says more about the state of political discourse in Canada than it does about the merits of the inquiry.

Who Dallas Brodie Is — And What She Lost

Brodie is the MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena. She is now the interim leader of OneBC — a new provincial party founded in June 2025, accessible at 1bc.ca. She didn't choose that path — it was chosen for her.

In early 2025, Brodie appeared on a podcast and asked questions about the evidentiary basis for the Kamloops grave claims and the spending they triggered. The BC Conservative Party expelled her for it. Not for making false claims. Not for defamation. For asking questions that the party found politically inconvenient.

That expulsion is itself a story. An elected Member of the Legislative Assembly — chosen by her constituents to represent them and to scrutinize government — was removed from her caucus for demanding that public money be backed by verified evidence. In any healthy democratic culture, her questions would have earned a committee hearing, not a pink slip.

Instead, she built a new party. OneBC is early, small, and facing steep odds. But the fact that it exists is a direct consequence of a political establishment — across party lines — that has decided certain questions simply cannot be asked.

The Broader Pattern: DRIPA and the Accountability Vacuum

The residential school funding story does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader pattern in BC politics in which claims rooted in Indigenous history are treated as beyond scrutiny — and in which that exemption from scrutiny is being used to justify enormous transfers of money and power.

Under DRIPA, the BC government has been progressively granting Indigenous organizations authority over land use decisions, resource development, and governance — based in significant part on historical claims that are asserted but often unverified. The same logic that transformed GPR anomalies into 215 confirmed children is at work in land claims processes: assertion treated as established fact, with public money and resource rights flowing accordingly.

Who is benefiting from the residential school grave searches? Consulting firms specializing in GPR surveys. Indigenous governance organizations that receive search funding. Lawyers who advise on the legal implications of any finds. The search economy is real, even if the confirmed remains are not.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a straightforward observation about how government spending creates constituencies and how those constituencies then have incentives to sustain the conditions that fund them.

The Question That Won't Go Away

The TRC's documented record of 4,100+ residential school deaths represents the factual foundation upon which meaningful reconciliation must be built. That foundation is solid. Supplementing it with unverified GPR anomaly counts — and spending $321.4 million on the basis of those unverified claims — does not honour the real dead. It muddies the evidentiary record and redirects resources away from accountable, verifiable historical work.

Demanding evidence is not the same as denying history. It is, in fact, the only way to protect history from being distorted by political pressures and funding incentives. Dallas Brodie understood that. The political establishment punished her for it.

Watch Making a Killing at makingakilling.ca. Share it. The questions Dallas Brodie is asking deserve answers — not expulsion.