Madam Speaker, I rise today in the House with a broken heart and feeling devastated. The discovery of the remains of 215 indigenous children buried behind a residential school in Kamloops is terrible. I cannot understand it; it is so terribly sad.
As a white person, I am ashamed. As a mother, I feel sick, physically sick. There are periods of history that are so dark, so ugly and so dirty that we have a sacred responsibility to remember. Never again. The children had the right to live, the right to love and the right to grow up. We, the white society, gave them nothing but neglect and mistreatment. It is appalling.
On behalf of the Bloc Québécois and, most certainly, on behalf of all Quebeckers, I wish to extend my deepest and most sincere condolences to the Tk’emlups community and all first nations that suffered such treatment. My heart goes out to them.