Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to say thank you to all the witnesses tonight. Your testimony is very valuable for us as we understand some of these very important issues that we are dealing with as a committee.
I've appreciated much of the testimony and many of the questions tonight. One thing I've consistently heard in my conversations with people is the idea of how slow this is, how long it's taken. We've heard that expressed by the witnesses tonight. The second thing we've talked lots about is the education component of all this and how important that is to the success of these measures.
I want to share a quick story. I had an opportunity late this fall to meet with Vice-Chief Derocher of one of my tribal councils. He stopped in to see me. We were talking, actually, in the context of Orange Shirt Day. It was shortly after Orange Shirt Day. We come from very small communities in northern Saskatchewan. He was in the big city of Saskatoon, which is still pretty small relative to a lot of your cities. He talked about being in Saskatoon on September 30, on Orange Shirt Day. He talked about all the evidence of the orange shirts he saw in that city on that day. As Vice-Chief Derocher shared the story, you could see the tears welling up in his eyes as he shared that experience and the importance of recognizing some of those things. He also talked a whole bunch about how education was the solution to many of these issues, not only the newcomers booklet but the education in our schools, the education of adults in our society.
My question is in the context of the TRC calls to action. There are two calls to action in the section called “Newcomers to Canada”, 93 and 94. The minister talked about both today. Some of you have alluded to those. It seems to me that the order of these, maybe, is a bit of a problem from a process perspective, where we have the call to action on the citizenship oath before we have the education component. My thought is that maybe these things should be combined and the education component should be further down the journey as we do this.
I'd be curious to hear all of the witnesses comment on that, starting with Ms. Wilson.