Mr. Speaker, this debate is very interesting and it is certainly very important.
Rather than ask a question, I would like to make a few comments.
There are a lot of grey areas in this debate. Everything seems kind of vague: the number of children who died, where they died, the illnesses they had and all the circumstances surrounding the whole thing.
It is a bit strange because we can assume the federal government covered the children's cost of living or, in this case, their cost of not living. When children died in some residential school or another, be it in British Columbia, Quebec or elsewhere, a member of the clergy surely had to notify the federal government so it could stop sending money. One would expect some bureaucrat to record the fact that the child had died, how old the child was and the circumstances of their death. How can it possibly be that there was no file comprehensively documenting what happened?
If there is no such record, maybe that means the church communities themselves kept the money. If they did not inform the federal government, we might be staring at a financial scandal here. Church communities might have kept the money. These are really important questions that have not really been addressed in this debate.
Would my colleague care to comment on that?