Calls for B.C. mayor to resign over residential school book incident

There are growing calls for the mayor of Quesnel, Ron Paull, to resign after revelations his wife has been handing out a book that, according to promotional material from its publisher, questions whether residential schools were fundamentally harmful to Indigenous communities and people who attended them.

More than 200 people marched outside city hall Tuesday evening before packing into an emotionally charged council meeting in the city of roughly 23,000 people, in B.C.'s Cariboo region about 400 kilometres north of Vancouver.

"We can no longer work with this mayor and we will not work with the City of Quesnel until [the] issue has been resolved," said Lhtako Dene Chief Clifford Lebrun. 

"We can't have a community that hands out hate literature and expect people to listen to us and to take it seriously."

The meeting also heard from the mayor's wife, Pat Morton, and one of the authors featured in the book who had travelled to Quesnel to speak to council.

The controversy is a blow to reconciliation efforts, which have been at the forefront of city business.

Starting in 2015, council began a process of working with the Lhtako Dene, formally acknowledging them as partners on whose land the city was built. In the years since, it has taken other steps toward what it calls "true reconciliation," which include restoring ownership of a downtown park to the First Nation and, earlier this year, being the first city to officially co-host the B.C. Winter Games with an Indigenous community.

But those efforts have been threatened after a March 19 meeting in which council received a letter of concern from the Lhtako Dene about a book being distributed in the community by Morton, the wife of mayor Ron Paull, who was elected to office in 2022 after previously sitting as a councillor.

The book, titled Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools), by authors C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, contains essays, which its publisher says challenge several assertions made about the harms of residential schools. 

In publicity material for the book, the publishers, True North and Dorchester Books, said statements that residential schools traumatized Indigenous people across generations and destroyed Indigenous languages and culture are either "totally false or grossly exaggerated."

It also promises to challenge the notion that Indigenous people were forced to attend residential schools and whether the residential school system can appropriately be defined as genocide.

"Whoever wrote that book, they didn't go through residential school with us," Lhtako Dene Elder Bryant Paul told council this past Tuesday, while holding an eagle feather. "[At residential school] they beat us, sexually abused us."

Nazko First Nation Chief Leah Stump choked back tears as she addressed the council table.

"We deserve better than having to come here to prove we went to residential school, to prove that we were hurt and broken," she said.