A bit of truth on Truth and Reconciliation Day: Most recorded residential-school deaths were from tuberculosis and other infections, not murder. That is what the records and the TRC analysis show. There is no evidence of a government program to kill children and hide the bodies in secret mass graves. Crowded dorms, poor ventilation, weak diets, and slow medical care turned the schools into disease traps. Kids often arrived with little immunity. TB was already killing people on and off the reserves. The same diseases killed white children in orphanages, hospitals, and ordinary boarding schools. Child death rates were high across Canada until antibiotics and public health improved. The 2007 settlement already paid about $5 billion to survivors. Later lawsuits added billions more. Those were legal payouts for a system run by earlier governments and churches. Living taxpayers did not operate those schools. The reason the bills keep coming is not that every Canadian is personally guilty. It is that Ottawa keeps settling new claims and expanding annual Indigenous program spending—now tens of billions a year—under a political story that treats historical harm as a permanent moral debt on everyone alive today. The death record does not require that story. It's time to stop the shakedown. Officials keep cashing political points by blaming people who weren't born when those schools existed. History is not a blank cheque. Enough.