Jim McMurtry is an award-winning teacher in Abbotsford B.C., who has a PhD in Educational History and over four decades of experience. Mr. McMurtry rejects any form of indoctrination of children and advocates for academic values, such as open debate and critical thinking.

On Friday, May 28, 2021, headlines flashed across Canada that the remains of 215 children had been found at a Kamloops residential school. The story went viral over the weekend. On Monday, May 31, 2021, Jim McMurtry’s students were buzzing with the news and understandably upset. They wanted to talk. One of the students said that priests murdered and tortured the children at a residential school and then left them to die in the snow.

McMurtry responded to the student by stating a simple fact that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission corroborates: most of the children who died at residential schools did so from disease, primarily tuberculosis. Upon hearing this fact, which differed from the unsubstantiated Kamloops news story, the student immediately complained to other staff, which led to McMurtry being marched out of the school the same day–without even a discussion–and placed under investigation.

On February 21, 2023, Mr. McMurtry was officially fired by the Abbotsford School District. He has since filed a grievance and is awaiting arbitration. In McMurtry’s words, “My employer and my regulatory body require teachers to lie to students about history, gender and race. This is the new ideology in schools, known as Social Justice Theory or wokeism.” He has published a book about his ordeal called The Scarlet Lesson, which details the persecution of a teacher who was only telling students the facts.

It is important to note that, as of August 2025, no bodies have been found at Kamloops, and the original headlines have been edited from ‘burials’ to ‘probable burials’ to ‘targets of interest’. Meanwhile, children were emotionally manipulated to believe that teachers murdered students. As well, numerous churches were vandalized or burned to the ground that summer as a reaction to this irresponsible reporting.