Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for your appearance today.
As my honourable colleague mentioned, it is not a government bill. It is my colleague's: Ms. Georgina Jolibois, a Dene person from La Loche in Saskatchewan. I think the idea behind the official writing of the bill is to actually.... The debate around the dates has been coming, but the bill is not evoking a date. It's evoking “the day fixed by proclamation as National Indigenous Peoples Day”.
According to me, the date is something that of course we have to agree on, but the principle we have to agree on is that it should be a statutory holiday. If we pursue this tandem approach of a comparison between July 1 and Memorial Day, National Indigenous Peoples Day could be a statutory holiday so that we can all celebrate our heritage and our shared relation with the first nations and indigenous people, Métis and Inuit. This is what this bill is about. It's not about the date. We can come up with a proposal for a date, but the bill itself is about the fact that shouldn't “the day fixed by proclamation as National Indigenous Peoples Day” be a statutory holiday? As I've heard many times from the other side, this is surely a worthy investment. We need to celebrate this, and we need to fix this.
Do you want to intervene, Mr. Obed?