Discovery of unmarked graves The Canadian Press news story of the year

The discovery of unmarked graves at a former residential school in the British Columbia Interior and the countrywide awakening it set off have been chosen as Canada’s news story of the year by editors in newsrooms across the country.

There were 38 editors in the annual Canadian Press survey who picked the finding at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School as the most compelling and deeply revealing story of 2021.

That compared with 31 votes for Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout and 13 for climate change and B.C. weather that saw massive fires in the summer and floods in the fall.

The story broke last May when the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation in Kamloops said a search at the former school with ground-penetrating radar found what were believed to be the remains of up to 215 children.

Tk’emlups Chief Rosanne Casimir said then that they had “a knowing” in their community that the missing children were undocumented deaths.

The Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan later used the same technology to discover 751 unmarked graves, and First Nations in Brantford, Ont., and Williams Lake, B.C., are searching residential school sites in their territory.