Imagine if you could have voted while residential schools were still operating. When you were reading headlines like children are “dying like flies” because of the “absolute inattention to the bare necessities of health” in these federally controlled institutions, would you have spoken up and refused to vote for any government that perpetrated what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission coined “cultural genocide?”

In June, headlines of the unmarked graves of hundreds of children confronted Canadians with the reality that government-run residential schools were more akin to re-education camps and death traps than “schools.” Flags were lowered, the number “215” on orange shirts and hearts appeared everywhere and then the headlines faded and so did the shirts, but the injustices kept building.

Months later, more than 5,000 unmarked graves have been identified and yet political leaders have said little about it and neither has the media. The story that got the most…