Mr. Speaker, newspaper reports indicate that the minister is to enter into an agreement for $10 million in compensation for 17 Inuit families that were voluntarily relocated to the high Arctic in the 1950s. Although the move was not without its hardships, the new community is reported to be among the most successful in the high Arctic.
Contrary to documentary evidence and the good reputation of government officials at the time, the politically predictable Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples condemned the move and recommended compensation. The Globe and Mail suggested that this would apply a retroactive morality, satisfying a need to assert the contemporary cant of political correctness.
Rather than engaging in historical revisionism and settling old grievances, imagined or real, the government would be better advised to focus on contemporary needs.