Madam Speaker, from mid-April through the end of May, Alberta saw the highest rate of infection in North America from COVID-19. Fourteen separate outbreaks at oil sands work camps made the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, home to a mere 70,000 people, the epicentre of COVID infections in Canada.
Jason Kenney blames the high infection rate on indigenous people's vaccine hesitancy despite the very obvious fact that the COVID infections were spreading from the oil camps that his government deemed essential. Kenney's racist scapegoating did, however, bring attention to indigenous communities in Alberta and across Canada and to the challenges that these communities face in a global pandemic. Without adequate housing, health care and other basic infrastructure, the threat this virus and all infectious diseases pose to indigenous communities is acute.
I want to thank the government for its targeted vaccine distribution to indigenous communities and for getting COVID-19 emergency support to them during this crisis. It was useful during an emergency, in this emergency, not the emergency that we are currently seeing in northern Ontario. However, it does beg the question: Why does it take an emergency as serious as a global pandemic for the government to do the right thing?
Kenney's scapegoating of indigenous communities in Wood Buffalo was disgusting, but it was built upon Canada's legacy of genocide against indigenous people and on the current government's continual refusal to meet its obligations.
A shockwave went through the country just a couple of weeks ago when the unmarked burials of 215 children were discovered at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. These children, as young as three years old, died in a genocide. They died in a system designed to kill the Indian in the child, the very definition of a genocide, an attempt to destroy the identity, language, culture and familial connections that define a people and hold them together. These children died along with thousands of other children across 100 residential schools because they were an inconvenience to European settlers and they were in the way.
Now, as hundreds more unmarked burials of children are found at sites, the shock will subside but the shame will continue. Of the 94 calls to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, how many has the government enacted? Five and a half years ago, the Prime Minister promised to implement all the recommendations. Five and a half years ago, even the government's own website, which has the most glowing account of the government's response that one could possibly find anywhere, clearly demonstrates the government's failure.
Addressing the genocide of the past, not even providing for the smallest ask of the TRC for support so that indigenous communities could find their children's unmarked burials is one type of failure. However, continuing that genocidal legacy by taking residential school survivors to court, by fighting indigenous children seeking their basic rights in court is a failure of a whole other level. That is shameful.
A few months ago, we learned that the government spent over $3 million to fight the release of documents from St. Anne's residential school in Ontario, more than was requested to find burials. It spent $3 million of Canadians' money to keep residential school survivors and their family members from learning the truth about St. Anne's.
That was today. When will this genocide end?