Mr. Speaker, I was very impressed with my hon. colleague's discussion. She raised the issue of mould, the mould that we have seen in the community of Kashechewan, but it is very clear that mould is endemic in first nations homes across Canada.
I was in the community of Barriere Lake, where I worked for many years. We would plead for Health Canada officials to come in. We would document the mould conditions. We had documents which indicated that seniors who had died in the community because of respiratory health problems had been living in homes that had been identified by Health Canada as posing a risk to their health. Nothing was done. The elders died.
We saw that in Barriere Lake. We have seen it in the mould in Kashechewan. We saw it in the children's school in Attawapiskat that was condemned, when no efforts were made by the former government to deal with the crisis in that community.
I have a question for the hon. member in terms of the issue of being honest about the obligation of government to protect human health. We had a situation in Attawapiskat in which the community had to shut down its own school, a school that was under the overall jurisdiction of the federal government. The former Indian affairs minister did nothing to address that. Year after year nothing was done to address the fact that children were being sent to school on the site of one of the largest fuel spills ever recorded in Canada. There were records of people getting sick. Nothing was done then and still nothing has been done as far as we can tell.
Why does the hon. member think a government that sat on massive surpluses in budgets year after year never bothered to get off its royal duff to actually help first nations health when people's lives were being directly impacted and the government knew it?