Oh Canada..

Well, this is a disturbing picture! A protest in Saskatoon, Canada resulted in red paint being daubed on the doors of the Roman Catholic cathedral there. The reason for the protest is the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing (mostly) children at the former Marieval Indian Residential School which operated between 1899 and 1997. It was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by religious authorities with the aim of assimilating indigenous youth, it's estimated that around 6,000 children died while attending these schools, due in large part to the squalid health conditions inside. The kids were often not allowed to speak their own native language, and many were mistreated and abused, one survivor labelled these institutions as "pedophile playgrounds". 215 children's remains were found earlier in the year at a similar school in Kamloops. Predictably the church are yet to issue a formal apology and indigenous leaders are expecting more gruesome discoveries. It's almost like a law of Physics, when zealous, proselytizing religions are aligned with state power, particularly in an attempt to assimilate a subjugated population, it almost always ends up with unmarked graves! When will we ever learn.