Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Sault Ste. Marie.
I want to begin by acknowledging the member for Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River for bringing this important motion before the House. With the long, sad and tragic history and the unimaginable consequences for survivors, their families and the communities, it is long past the time for the House and the government to issue an apology for the survivors of residential schools.
I also want to acknowledge and thank the member for Winnipeg Centre for his tireless work on the file on residential schools. He has been a tireless advocate and defender and champion of ensuring there was an adequate agreement on residential schools that moved in a timely fashion.
The one thing we do know is that residential schools were not just about the survivors. It was also about their families and their communities. In a book called Journeying forward: Dreaming First Nations' independence by Patricia Monture-Angus, she talks about the reality of residential schools and talks about it in a way that is respectful, to use the words of people who were involved. She says:
What would you do if you were a child being removed from your parents' arms? Would you scream, “Mom, help! Mom, help!”? What would you do if you saw your parents standing there helplessly? Would you feel, “They should have stopped them from taking me”? What would you feel if you had arrived in that big building where there were people speaking a funny language and when you spoke the language you knew, you were hit and told to speak in that strange language? What if your culture taught that your hair was part of your spirit, and the strange people cut off your hair...?
She goes on to talk about the fact that, just as these children were abused in innumerable ways in residential schools, when people came back to their communities it had a long-lasting impact on their families. She says:
In my opinion, there has been enough written that focuses on the specific harms, often cataloguing the crimes, inflicted on First Nations children. This very narrow focus operates to conceal the outcomes and impacts those schools have had on our families and communities. My point is not to minimize the harms done to individuals but to make clearly the point that these crimes are just a small portion of the actual impact. One of the things that needs to be considered is the simple fact that we did survive the genocidal educational attempts of Canadian authorities.
Those are very strong words but it is important to talk about what happened to children in those schools. The RCAP report eloquently lays out the challenges that were faced by first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples across this country for so many decades. In Volume 1 of the RCAP report, under “Looking Forward Looking Back, Chapter 10 -- Residential Schools”, it lays out the litany of not only physical neglect, but emotional and spiritual neglect as well.
The RCAP report states that there were:
--systemic problems, particularly the lack of financial resources, the persistence of those problems and the unrelieved neglect of the children can be explained only in the context of another deficit — the lack of moral resources, the abrogation of parental responsibility. The avalanche of reports on the condition of children — hungry, malnourished, ill-clothed, dying of tuberculosis, overworked — failed to move either the churches or successive governments past the point of intention and on to concerted and effective remedial action.
The remedial action was not only around righting the wrongs and ensuring the children were well cared for and returned to their parents so that culture and language could survive but also around the sexual and physical abuse that many of those children suffered. Part of the remedy must be an apology.
In the section entitled “Discipline and Abuse”, the report goes on to state:
The basic premise of resocialization, of the great transformation from 'savage' to 'civilized', was violent. “To kill the Indian in the child”, the department aimed at severing the artery of culture that ran between generations and was the profound connection between parent and child sustaining family and community.
Finally, part of what is before the House today is a need for a profound apology by members of the House and certainly from the government.
The report concludes by stating:
Rather than attempting to close the door on the past, looking only to the future of communities, the terrible facts of the residential school system must be made a part of a new sense of what Canada has been and will continue to be for as long as that record is not officially recognized and repudiated. Only by such an act of recognition and repudiation can a start be made on a very different future. Canada and Canadians must realize that they need to consider changing their society so that they can discover ways of living in harmony with the original people of the land
I would argue that until we have a heartfelt apology from the very root of our being, first nations, Métis and Inuit people cannot get on with claiming their space as the original inhabitants of this land.
As well, we talk often about first nations, but it is very important that we also talk about Métis and Inuit peoples as well, because they were also a part of the residential school system. The RCAP report talks about how the things that happened in the south also happened in the northern part of this country. The RCAP report states:
In the north, as in the south in the days before integration, the government with its church partners presumed to stand in the place of the children's parents, taking children into residential schools so they could “face the future in a realistic manner”--that being “as true Canadian citizens”. Unfortunately, the record of this national presumption, whether traced in the north or the south cannot be drawn as a “circle of civilized conditions”.
I would suggest that there is not one member in this House who would willingly give up his or her children to live in the conditions that first nations, Métis and Inuit children lived in.
When it comes to the Métis peoples, there have been lengthy discussions around the inclusion of Métis people. In fact, the current Prime Minister made a promise to take action around the Ile a la Crosse school. I have a number of letters here, which I of course will not read because it would take far more than the 10 minutes allotted, but I want to read just one for members. It says:
Dear Mr. Prime Minister:
During the election campaign, while [I was] listening to the MBC radio station, your Conservative Party advertisement stated that if your party was elected and formed the government that you would include the Boarding School at Ile a la Crosse in...the compensation package dealing with the Indian Residential School Survivors.
I am from the village of Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan, and attended the Ile a la Crosse Boarding School for 10 years....
Therefore, although we absolutely need this apology, we also need action on other matters facing Métis people, Inuit people and first nations people in this country to ensure that we make an attempt to right some of these wrongs. Certainly one of them would be recognition of schools such as Ile a la Crosse and Timber Bay for the Métis peoples.
In the context of the schools, I did hear the minister get up and say that the government would support an apology by the House, but we also feel that it would be important to have the Prime Minister apologize as a representative of the sitting government, although I am not optimistic, given the minister's quote in the Globe and Mail from March 27, when he said:
I've said quite clearly that the residential school chapter of our history is one that was a difficult chapter. Many things happened that we need to close the door on as part of Canadian history, but fundamentally, the underlying objective had been to try and provide an education to aboriginal children and I think the circumstances are completely different from Maher Arar or also from the Chinese head tax.
Whether it was an attempt at assimilation or an attempt at genocide, or a misguided attempt to educate people in a way that the people of the day would not have imagined educating their own children, surely Canadians owe an apology to first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in this country.
As well as looking at the issues around the need for an apology, we also need to take a look at the additional supports that are required in order for first nations, Métis and Inuit communities to truly heal. I would argue that we need to ensure funds are in place for such things as the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which supports that healing in communities. We know that many communities have moved on and have healing programs in place that are truly helping communities recover, but we must continue to work with first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples to develop and design programs that meet communities' needs to have that healing truly take place.
In conclusion, I encourage each and every member of this House to support this motion and call on the House to issue that apology quickly.