Mr. Speaker, I am at a loss for words once again this evening. I cannot express how much it pains me to talk about residential schools.
It pains me as a mother, because I think of all those who lost their children. I think of all of the families and nations that carry the heavy burden of the past. It pains me to think that for decades and centuries, in British North America and then Canada, there were attempts to literally erase the peoples who had lived here for thousands of years.
It pains me to think of all of those men, women and children, dead or alive, who had to suffer to allow for Canada's plans to expand its dominion from coast to coast, engaging in a cultural genocide to kill the Indian in the child, which resulted in killing the child in the Indian.
However, it pains me even more to know that, over the course of my years here in Parliament, I have been asking myself the following question: Why do we keep talking about these horrors year after year without ever making any progress?
I must admit, I cannot even imagine how painful and frustrating it must be for the families of the victims of residential schools and for the communities themselves, while we, here in the House, entered politics to change things. We are not seeing things change, and neither are they. Things are not changing quickly enough.
I know that today, at this time, this is a solemn moment, and we do not want to politicize the matter before us, and rightly so. However, for things to move forward, it is my duty, as a member of the opposition, to ask the right questions.
Let us first establish some facts.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has counted 3,200 residential school students who died. Today, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation estimates that number to be closer to 4,118. Even so, the most recent evidence suggests that these numbers could be much higher and might soon reach 6,000 dead.
This morning, in an article published in The Globe and Mail, former senator and Truth and Reconciliation commissioner Murray Sinclair estimated that the number could be higher still, suggesting that up to 15,000 children could have died in the residential schools.
Six years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report was released, it seems that the more we know, the less we know. What happened to bring us to this point?
Obviously, we need to shine a light on this, including on the financial role of the federal government and the degree of collaboration between the church and the federal government. As we know, Canada funded the religious orders that ran the residential schools with a per-child allowance.
When the allowance was suspended, did the government keep a record of the children who had died? How is it that the federal government subsidized their education without knowing that information? Did the church keep records on the children in order to collect those subsidies?
We need to take a closer look at these issues. They need to be addressed urgently because families need to know. It is an essential condition for them to grieve and to heal.
In closing, we also need to shed light on addressing the commission's calls to action 72 to 78. Of the $33.8 million allocated in budget 2019, $27.1 million still remains to be spent. We need to shed light on the past. We also need to shed light on this. Our duty to remember is at stake here, as well as our duty to honour indigenous peoples.
My heart goes out to the communities in Kamloops and all the communities on the north coast of Quebec and Canada.
[Member spoke in Innu]