Madam Speaker, I know the member for Yukon is a father, as I am. My most visceral understanding of the residential school system came as a South Asian man with a South Asian wife trying inelegantly to teach Hindi to his kids. I thought about how my wife and I were not very successful at this endeavour.
I tried to explain to my kids that the problem that Dene, Sioux or Cree kids have is not that their parents are not good enough at teaching them; it is that they were actually beaten and hurt if they dared to speak their language at a school that was kilometres away from the place they called home. That is something of a completely different order, in terms of the obstacle that was put in place for those children. The impacts of that kind of system continued to be felt. That is what motivated me so much on indigenous languages work and really opened my eyes.
My thanks to the member for Yukon on his compliment about my human rights work, but I will frankly admit that I was quite embarrassed by my lack of human rights understanding about the indigenous experience in this country and the poor nature of indigenous human rights in this country, until the work that I did in the last Parliament. It clearly opened my eyes and it has helped me become a stronger advocate for this critically important cause.
I firmly believe in my core that until we address these issues, we cannot really even begin to address some of the other pernicious issues that affect human rights for Canadians.