Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank both our honoured guests for being here and sharing their perspectives with us. This has been extremely interesting and extremely important.
I have a question for both of you, but the first question is for the chief of Ekuanitshit. I want to follow up on some of the comments you made regarding racism and the colonialism that impacts your communities and all of our communities across Canada.
We speak of Joyce Echaquan, who perished in a hospital in Quebec. We have a horrifying story of an Inuit woman in the Ottawa Hospital this week. There's Bill C-92 that you speak of, and in my province of Alberta, Bill 1 is deeply racist towards indigenous people.
One of the worries I have with a day for truth and reconciliation.... Of course I'm strongly supportive of it. It's something that my colleague Georgina Jolibois brought forward in the last Parliament. One of my worries is that we will use it as a way to sort of check a box. It needs to be a start. It needs to not be our efforts at reconciliation. It needs to be recognized as an important start, but a very beginning piece on how we deal with racism.
I'd love it if you could talk to me a little bit about those next steps that you think the government needs to take to deal with the systematic institutional racism in every province in this country.