Mr. Speaker, I am always proud to rise in the House, but I am certainly not proud to have to talk tonight about the fact that since January 2015, the Government of Canada has been found to be guilty of systemic racist discrimination against indigenous children. It is a black mark on everything this nation stands for, that the current government has continued to deny its obligation to respond. We have now had two compliance orders issued by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that the current government is ignoring.
What does this denial of services, this discrimination, mean?
I think of the seven youth from Thunder Bay who were found dead in the rivers of Thunder Bay when they had to leave home at age 13 to go to school because they did not have schools in their communities. The government sent a bureaucrat to say under oath that the government did not think there were any shortfalls in education for indigenous youth.
I think of the youth who are being denied audiology treatments because the bureaucrats will save money. I think of the children who died in Treaty 9 from basic childhood illnesses because the government would not bother to provide medical care for them.
I think of the mother who said to me that she wanted to know where her babies were at night. They say that a nation cannot be defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground, and yet in indigenous communities across this country, there are more children being taken away from their parents and their mothers right now than at the height of the residential schools.
We will hear from the government that, yes, they are putting money in, that they are putting a record amount of money into child welfare. The government is $130 million short this year. The Liberals decided they could shortchange the children.
They said they would close that funding gap in education. Not a dime has flowed. Guess what? The school year has started. The Liberals promised $50 million this year for post-secondary education for indigenous children. They broke that promise.
The Liberals say they are going to give a record amount of money based on Jordan's Principle, but they do not tell us that this will not include most children in this country. Here I would mention, for example, the young Cree girl who was denied emergency orthodontic surgery. We asked the government to look into that case, and we found out what the denial rate was. There was was a 99% denial rate for indigenous children needing emergency orthodontic surgery. Can someone on that side stand up and tell me that is not systemic racist discrimination?
What I find most shocking is that we have a Prime Minister who has named himself the minister of youth and said that this is the most important relationship in this nation to repair, but he decided that he can shortchange indigenous children this year, next year, and the year after. The Liberals were not going to shortchange the upper middle class when they gave them the tax breaks. That money flowed right away.
We have a government that is continuing to play games with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. It is continuing to play games with Cindy Blackstock.
We have children who are continuing to die. In my region, there were 700-plus suicide attempts in about four communities since 2009. It is because those children are regularly denied access to mental health services. They are regularly denied the ability to get out to get treatment. They are left on their own. What kind of nation thinks it can squander its children?
What is it going to take to have the government admit that it needs to comply with the decisions of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and end this?
The cheapest and simplest of all the promises the Prime Minister makes would be to meet the needs of these children. The Liberals need to do it, and I am asking them to commit to doing that tonight.