The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Spectator Outloud. Each week, we ask three of our favourite writers from the magazine to read out their pieces.

In this week's episode, we hear from Professor Robert Toombs, the historian, about Canada's

willingness to believe anything bad about itself.

Then we hear from Jamie Blackett, a farmer who writes about the harms of wild camping.

And finally, Tanya Gold reviews the new reopening of the Clarurgist Restaurant.

First up is the historian Robert Tooms.

Readers would doubtless find it hard to believe that the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh

kidnapped and killed Indigenous children while on a state visit to Canada in 1964.

Yet this story circulated for years in Canada, along with other

horror stories of the rape, torture and murder of indigenous children at the hands of depraved

priests and nuns. The bodies it was said were thrown into furnaces or secretly buried at dead of

night. These accusations were linked to boarding schools

run by various ridges bodies

first established in the 19th century

and finally closed in the 1990s.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission

was set up in 2008

and millions of dollars were given by the government

to search for clandestine mass graves. None was found.

Then in 2021, a single survey of an orchard at Kamloops in British Columbia by a young anthropologist

using ground penetrating radar found disturbances in the ground, and this was taken as

...