Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to stand in this place and speak to such an important issue. I do have to recognize the incredible work my colleagues have done on this, and will continue to do until we repeal the Indian Act and we have full justice and equality in our country, which is sadly lacking.
I would like to explain how I have come to understand the issue we are debating today. I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, in the Annapolis Valley. Through my entire early childhood years, I can never remember much discussion of my indigenous neighbours except to hear about Glooscap's legend and a few other quaint stories, important to local people at times. I really had no context, because in Nova Scotia, like all across our country, there had been great discrimination against first nations Mi’kmaq people from that area.
I remember when I was a kid, I went to a drive-in movie. The sun was just setting, and I was sitting there in the car. I remember looking over and there were kids looking across the drive-in movie fence. I asked my mom who those folks were. She said they lived on the local reserve. Until that time, I had never really realized there were indigenous people living in my community.
We had always had debates about the Acadians, whom the British had pushed off the land. In fact, the land on which my parents' house stood was on Acadian land. We could still see some of the old structure. However, we never had a conversation about the Mi’kmaq. It never really came into the conversations in our household or in our school. It was never taught, except for a few local legends, which were always capitalized on by the colonizers.
It starts to eat away at someone. As a young person, I was not quite sure how to deal with this stuff. However, it was present. I am happy to say that when I was driving along a Nova Scotia highway about six months ago, I started to notice they are naming the reserves on the highway signs. One can actually know, going down the highway, that there is a community there that was never named in the past. That is a very small step toward reconciliation and bringing equality. I am 50 years old. It has taken decades and decades for just that small thing to get done.
I remember the first time I ever said the word “genocide” about indigenous people in Canada. I was a young lecturer at Simon Fraser University, and I was teaching the administration of justice. With my colleague, Paddy Smith, a great mentor of mine, we decided the course had never had a full lecture about aboriginal rights in Canada, so we decided this would be a good time to start.
When one actually starts to research the history of the administration of justice in Canada, one realizes just one lecture, one course, or one degree is not enough, that there need to be entire institutions that look at this sad history.
I remember standing in front of a class of 200 people for the first time saying that Canadians had committed genocide. When I talked about how the Beothuk people were wiped off the face of the earth by our ancestors, it made me realize, with shame, how this whole history had been hidden. At least I can say those first-year students had some sense, somewhere to start, to ask how do we get to reconciliation.
That was probably 15 years ago. I worked on a program and did some research for the Department of Justice looking at on-reserve voting during that period as well.
The amount of damage starts to get overwhelming. Coming from Nova Scotia, where we had the original Europeans coming over, it is reported historically that there was some co-operation there. We went from this co-operation to oppression, to cultural genocide when we think about the residential schools right across the country.
My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley, earlier today was talking about South Africa coming to look at our reserve systems and saying, “This is how you do it. Let's do it back home.”
Then I come to the House of Commons where all of these decisions were made. People just like us here in the House today put act after act forward, which then went to the Senate. Perhaps it was before Canada had a legislature as well. The British are definitely to blame for this. In the House of Commons, act after act after act reinforced and made worse the terrible treatment of people who I did not even know were my neighbours when I was growing up.
We owe it to our future generations and past generations of those who suffered to do the right thing, and I do not think we are doing the right thing. What I am hearing in this debate is that some administrative inconveniences are stopping us from doing the just thing. That does not seem to balance out, especially after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, especially after we looked at all the damage that was done to our neighbours, to the people we should love as much as we love ourselves. Then we get into a debate like this with a bill that goes back and forth between the other place and here. It sounds like people are saying that the bill is an administrative inconvenience, and that seems to be holding up justice, which does not make any sense to me.
I have a constituent in my riding who is in her seventies. She has been trying for 20 years to get her status. She has hired her own lawyers and has been helped by MPs in Burnaby and elsewhere. She came to my office and said she had tried over and over again to get her status but wants to try once more. We are trying to help her get her status, not for herself but for her future generations. Her husband recently passed away. She is indigenous; he was not. She has had to hide from her culture for so long and really wants to be proud of it, and this seems to be the time to do it. Look at what she has to go through. She has to hire her own lawyers and to go to members of Parliament for help. She has to revisit what her family members went through in the past. This seems totally unnecessary, especially when her male family members do not have to do the same thing.
We can talk about dotting the i's and crossing the t's and all of that kind of stuff, but really, when we get down to people, it does not matter. This should be done right away. It seems to me that this could be done very simply despite all of the administrative inconvenience. All we are doing is amending an act that should have been repealed in the first place.
If one is looking at this from the perspective of someone who has suffered, it must be inconceivable that we are doing this. I am deeply ashamed. We can do much better. It does not make any sense to me that one day we are talking about genocide and the next day we are questioning where a clause must go.
I really hope that after we get through this debate, we can get on with the real work.