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The Canadian Association of Journalists bestowed a dubious honour on the federal government last week over its policy of fighting Indigenous groups over access to records from Residential Schools for the last decade.
The CAJ made the federal government the 2024 recipient of the federal Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy for its continued campaign to fight the media and Indigenous groups over access to records that might let communities know what happened to their loved ones that never came home.
“Nearly ten years after the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s final report, Canada’s federal government continues to fight Indigenous groups from across the country seeking access to records surrounding Residential Schools,” the CAJ said.
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission painstakingly documented the horrific abuses of colonial power perpetrated against generations of Indigenous peoples,” CAJ president Brent Jolly said. “Despite the TRC’s findings of a ‘cultural genocide’ being committed against Indigenous peoples, the federal government continues to expend considerable efforts that prevent communities from accessing valuable documents that attest to the details of this truth. It’s shameful.”
The media in Canada has called on governments and churches in Canada to release the records for decades, the CAJ said.
“Despite being one of the (TRC) report’s Calls to Action, survivors and their families continue to fight for access to documents that could explain what happened to their family members,” it said.
The last Residential School in Canada closed its doors in 1996.
“The federal government has the moral obligation to ensure all records are made available in order to ensure truth, justice, and redress,” Jolly said. “The legacy of the Residential School system is a systemic scar on our country’s history that continues to go unhealed.”
In addition to the continued stonewalling on the release of Residential School records, this year’s Code of Silence jury also agreed to bestow a dishonourable mention to Canada’s top three federal political parties.
For instance, the federal Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic parties each appealed a landmark decision by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gordon Weatherhill which said federal political parties are, in fact, subject to the province’s privacy laws.
Federal political parties have to comply with the Canada Elections Act, but are excluded from all other federal privacy laws. As such, without the application of provincial privacy law, parties have few restrictions on what they can do with the personal information of voters, the CAJ said.
“Modern politics is powered by data,” Jolly said. “But in 2025, Canadians are largely in the dark about what data parties collect in order to fundraise, campaign and/or target them in their pursuit of political power.”
The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the CAJ, the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University , and the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). The awards call attention to government- or publicly-funded agencies that work hard to hide information to which the public has a right under access-to-information laws.
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