Madam Speaker, I was very pleased to hear my colleague speak to this issue, but I am concerned about the issue of six long years. Never let it be said in the House that I have given the Conservatives a break on anything, but we are talking about 100 lost years. Anybody who is my age or older who is a first nation and was taken from his or her family and put in the residential schools, we apologized for that two years ago. Anybody younger than I am was put in those federal schools which were basically dumps with substandard education. Then the people were turned over to band schools without funding.
We are seeing an accumulation of decades of systemic negligence and abuse that has gone all the way through Indian Affairs where the reports have sat on desks. This was never a priority until children made it a priority. That is what makes today's motion different.
Rather than go back and forth as to how we got here, Shannen's dream talks about the necessary steps of going forward. Can we as a Parliament in this day and age rectify the 100 years of abuse of first nations children and say this is the beginning when we start to march forward?