Mr. Speaker, loneliness, betrayal, exploitation and loss of love was the plight of over 100,000 home children shipped from England to Canada between 1860 and 1939. Two-thirds of these children were under 14 years of age and two-thirds of them were abused. Some who came were as young as four years old.
Ada Allan, a British home child, said:
All those years, I didn't know what it was to be loved. In those times when they hired you, it was to work. I didn't sit at the table with them...I ate by myself. I was a servant. This grew on me. I felt very inferior even though I knew I was an honest person.
There was also documentation of sexual and physical mistreatment, as well as widespread flouting of regulations that required farmers to pay children's wages into trust accounts. Many of the children did not get any of that money. Then, as the leader of the Bloc said, there is the shame.
Another home child from the Ottawa Valley said:
I was one [a home child]...and a most unhappy and degrading period of my life it was. I don't even want to think about it and I haven't even told my children about it...Nothing except the Grace of God can dim the memory of that terrible period of my life.
The New Democratic Party of Canada supports the motion in front of us to name 2010 as the year of the British home child and the establishment of a commemorative stamp, but it is not enough.
As I said in my letter to the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism two weeks ago, the 10,000 British home children and their descendants need a formal apology from Parliament. These home children are now in their nineties and Parliament must give them the honour and recognition they deserve. Canada willingly participated in taking in these children, using them as free child labour. We willingly exploited them and offered no services and no protection to them. More needs to be done.
John Hennessey, a former child migrant, described why Canada accepted 100,000 of these children. On arrival in Fremantle, he and the other children were greeted by a senior clergyman who said, “We need white stock. We need this country to be populated by white stock because we are terrified of the Asian hordes”.
We must remember that Canada's immigration policy was quite racist at that time. It inflicted a Chinese head tax, and later the Chinese Exclusion Act, on the Chinese who helped build the railroad. Their children were not able to come to Canada. They too were separated from their families, just as the British children were separated from their families in England.
Hennessey said:
There was no understanding back then of the inner life of a human being. The draconian trauma of being sent across the sea, the loneliness of being placed on isolated farms, the lack of parental understanding, the treatment and discrimination that they faced because of their cockney accents, all these made it a terrible burden.
There are two more lessons that we can learn from this. First, we should not let our immigration policy be influenced purely and solely by our labour needs and we should not look just for cheap labour in our immigration policy. Second, we must remember that every child is precious and needs his or her parents. Whatever policy we have, whether it is our present live-in caregiver or temporary foreign workers program, we should not separate families.
I am proud as a New Democrat to tell the House that one of the most vocal critics at that time was Major James Coldwell, an early leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, which eventually became the New Democratic Party. Major Coldwell was very much opposed to this policy.
Britain continued to ship kids abroad for decades. The home children program came to an end in 1939; however the last batch of home children came to Canada in 1948.
We should be proud of these young men and women, because the British home children helped build this country. An amazing 12% of Canada's population is descended from these British home children. That translates into nearly four million people, or to put it another way, one in every eight Canadians.
We thank all of the British home children for their contribution. They helped build our country. They helped define Canada. Through their perseverance and determination they contributed to Canada. We apologize for the treatment they received.
Let us dedicate ourselves to educate future generations of Canadians so that we understand the history. Let us work together on a formal apology to the 100,000 home children who came to Canada.