Madam Speaker, this issue was raised by the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan who has been very concerned about the effect of the loss of cultural properties of the west coast natives.
When we are talking about this, we are continually putting this back in the context of the need for cultural memory. When we erase these memories from a society, when we take them away and then say that they never had anything great in the past, they were nothing, they were nobodies, this is the message that is continually done again and again in ethnic cleansing. This was done on the west coast. We have seen an amazing resurgence of community identity based on the return and the valuing of these properties because people identify with them in terms of their international significance from cultural and historical points of view.
In terms of our own Canadian experience, there has been a direct correlation between the return of identity and return of pride based on the return of these artifacts to their original owners.