Mr. Chair, as I said in my remarks, the first step is of course to acquire knowledge. It seems cold and awful, but that means identifying the sites, analyzing them and using technology to search them virtually. That data will have to be compiled, just like the data on missing and murdered women, to document what happened so we can acknowledge it and reflect on what we did.
The point is not to take responsibility on a daily basis for something that happened years ago, but we do have to at least accept our shared historical responsibility for it. Naturally, resources will have to be deployed and the sites will have to be protected.
As for the notion of genocide, I am wary of getting into a semantic debate over words. I am not afraid of the word “genocide”, and I have no problem saying “cultural genocide” if there is a desire for acculturation. However, I will leave it to first nations to choose the term we should use.