Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to enter into this debate. Let me say at the outset that the social conditions of Canada's first nation, Métis and Inuit people is perhaps Canada's greatest failure and in fact perhaps Canada's greatest shame.
At the core and at the very foundation of these appalling social conditions we can easily trace these conditions back to the impact of this terrible tragedy in social engineering, the Indian residential school legacy.
I agree with the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations when he says that reaching a just and fair resolution and closing the book on this chapter in our history is a necessary prerequisite before we can move on with the other necessary changes and accommodations we will have to introduce if we are to elevate the social conditions and the living conditions of Canada's first nations people.
I spent a great deal of time working on this file on the aboriginal affairs committee as we dealt with witnesses after witnesses, trying to implore the Liberal government to do the honourable thing and come to a just resolution. A number of things will haunt me forever from my experience on that committee. There are things that I will never forget. I think I have gained some insight as to what a profound effect this period of history has had on the people on whose behalf we speak today.
Let me give one example and I will not dwell on some of the horrific stories or the graphic illustrations that we heard. A woman named Flora Merrick from the province of Manitoba was a witness at our committee. She was 88 years old. She was making an application for compensation because of the abuse she suffered at a residential school.
She was nine years old when she ran away from the school to attend her mother's funeral. I am still affected by this today. She was caught, brought back to the school, beaten black and blue, and forced to stay in a closet day after day for as long as two weeks. This was her punishment for running away from the residential school to attend her mother's funeral as a scared nine-year old girl.
When she applied for $3,500 in compensation the Government of Canada spent $40,000 opposing her claim, saying that those were normal social conditions of the day, or those were cultural norms to use that level of discipline on a child.
Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver Island North. I hope it is not too late to do that.
The Government of Canada was willing to spend $40,000 when dealing with Flora Merrick's case to deny a claim of $3,500 from a woman who suffered abuse because it was the cultural norm of the time. That led National Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations to ask: In whose culture is it normal to beat a nine-year old girl black and blue because she ran away from school to attend her mother's funeral?
We were dumbfounded. Our jaws dropped around the table at the Indian affairs committee. I will never forget this decent, humble woman, 88 years old, presenting before our committee and telling us this story.
Finally, some of us started to grasp the true impact of what went on in many cases in that school. I ask as well this question. In whose culture could it possibly be considered normal to treat children in that way? It is not any culture or society that I want to belong to.
Before I go too far, I want to recognize and pay tribute to some of the people who are diligently working to bring a conclusion to this sad chapter in our history. Mr. Bob Watts has now been assigned as the head of the truth and reconciliation commission which will be up and running in the near future, in short months. Charlene Belleau diligently worked for years organizing conferences and trying to get the public's attention to alert Canadians that this was not some failed attempt to provide education.
The history of the Indian residential schools in this country was cultural genocide, plain and simple. Let us not use the words “an attempt to assimilate”. Let us call it what it was. It was to beat the Indian out of these kids. It went on for year after year. The Government of Canada knew, the Government of Canada directed it, and it contracted this work out. The sooner we all look at the truth of what happened there, the sooner both sides can begin to heal.
It is a necessary prerequisite not only for first nations people but I believe for white society to come to grips with our relationship with first nations. That is necessary.
I would also like to recognize an organization on Vancouver Island at Nanoose Bay called Tsow-Tun Le Lum Society. It is a residential school survivors treatment centre. I attended and spent time with some of the elders there, all of whom were survivors of the Port Alberni School, one of the residential schools with the most appalling history of pedophilia and sexual abuse. These survivors deserve our collective apology and that will never be enough.
A second thing that haunts me from my experience, and I still have a hard time thinking about it, is an image left with us by another elder, a woman, who told us that in her village they had decided they would not send their children to these schools any more. The children came back with stories of being beaten and abused. The said that they were not going to let them have their children any more.
When the RCMP came and literally ripped the children from their homes and seized them, the most memorable thing about that was the silence in the community, the eerie silence left behind when the children were no longer in the community, when no children were playing. There was no laughter, no children playing any more, just the sounds of the parents weeping as their children disappeared again because some of them knew the reality of what was happening in those places. They were chambers of horror.
Some were educational institutions; some were chambers of horror. Generation after generation, where the older brother would come home and tell the little brother how he was beaten and abused and the little brother would then get sent to this place. Imagine the fear of being sent to these places.
Father to son, generation after generation, year after year and people could not say no. They could not keep their children from going because the RCMP would come and rip them from their home and then there would be the eerie silence in the community with no children left in it.
The witnesses told us the third thing that I will share with you, Mr. Speaker, that will stay with me forever. They themselves bore intergenerational guilt for not knowing how to love their children, for not knowing how to hug their children or nurture their children because the intergenerational communication of those parenting skills had been interrupted by being ripped out of their homes and sent away for 10 years in a row.
Let us not forget, this was not summer camp for two or three months. This is all year, every year, for 10 years in a row for many of these children. They now do not know how to show affection or to nurture or to parent their own children. Their own children are emotionally starved, even though they have never seen a residential school. Their parents were damaged and that is the intergenerational damage that I see ever day on the streets of the inner city of Winnipeg.
I represent the largest off-reserve population in Canada. I see it every day where dysfunctional people trace many of their social problems to the intergenerational damage caused by the residential schools.
It costs nothing to apologize, but let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, what professionals and researchers say. The co-author of a recent report to the World Health Organization says that acknowledging the wrongs done to aboriginal people would significantly improve their health. The world realizes that an apology is healing and that the truth must be revealed, that there must be truth and reconciliation.
Lisa Jackson, from the university's indigenous health unit who co-authored this report, says that the social factors stemming from colonization are very significant, including the federal government's refusal to apologize for the past.
Cash is one thing and giving people compensation to help them get on with their lives and deal with the damage they have incurred and suffered is one thing, but it is no substitute for an apology. I would be proud if we could be a part of that, resulting from the motion that we have before us today.