Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for this opportunity to speak to this motion.
I would first like to take a moment to thank the hon. member for Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River for the initiative and his relentlessness in demanding that the Conservative government fulfill the commitment to apologize to the survivors of the residential schools.
In November 2005, the Liberal government reached a historic agreement intended to begin the healing process for the survivors. This agreement was comprehensive. Compensation for survivors, the creation of a truth and reconciliation process, and funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation were the pillars of this agreement, but most importantly for the survivors, whom I have had a chance to meet, was the inclusion of an apology.
Someone in this cold heartless government needs to sit and hold hands with the elders as they recount their painful stories. They believe that we can start over. They want to start the healing and they want to move on. They deserve what was promised, a simple human apology from the government, acknowledging their pain and suffering, but the Conservative government has backed away from this important part of the agreement. It has refused to apologize.
I would like to share with members of this House the experience I have had conveyed to me by my constituents. I have had the opportunity to sit down with many of the survivors who have relayed to me their stories of being taken away from their families, from their communities, from their culture, and from the only way of life that they knew, to be brought to these residential schools without fully understanding what was taking place. In some cases, children would have been taken from some of the remote reserves, never having been exposed to too much beyond their own communities, and this only added to their trauma.
In the Kenora riding, there are a number of large communities that are in the northern, fly-in area of my riding, and I will mention some of these now to explain later. There is Sandy Lake with Chief Pardemus Anishnabie, Bearskin Lake with Chief Rodney McKay, Big Trout Lake with Chief Donnie Morris, and Pikangikum with Chief Charlie Pascal. Many of these people know the pain first-hand.
Most of the reserves in the riding would have been a distance from town in the southern part. The remote reserves are accessible only by air, so though it may have been possible for parents in the south to visit the school and visit the children, if the schools would allow it, it was almost impossible for the parents of the remote reserves to visit, only adding to the anxiety of the situation.
It is difficult for me to imagine my children living apart from me, much less forcibly removed from my community or my home. Not having a say in their education or their well-being, and not being able to visit them would be extremely painful. If we can recognize that a policy such as this would be wrong today, why is it impossible for the government to acknowledge that it was wrong in the past?
The government would have us believe that an apology is not necessary because the children would have benefited from the education that these institutions provided. This is only another example of the pattern of blatant disregard and misunderstanding that the government has toward aboriginal people.
The first example of this pattern came when the government cancelled the historic Kelowna accord. This accord gave hope to aboriginal Canadians that they were going to be a part of Canadian society and that the gap between first nations and non-first nations Canadians could some day be narrowed. First nations people were hopeful for their children's futures, very different from the experiences that they had to endure themselves.
Residential schools survivors were placed in institutions of sickness. The government would rarely provide enough resources, so that every child would be provided with the basic necessities and hunger was common. So not only were these children taken from their families, they were placed in unhealthy, overcrowded institutions.
How could the government not acknowledge that these well documented conditions existed? By not apologizing, it is doing just that. It is saying to the survivors that their experiences did not matter, and this is shameful.
I would say to the government that the residential schools were more than boarding schools. They were a place where the government carried out its policy of assimilation and the destruction of the aboriginal culture, a culture that existed and persisted long before the Europeans arrived on this continent, and with a relatively short timeframe, the Government of Canada sought to destroy it.
I have always found it ironic how the Government of Canada thought it was necessary to educate aboriginal Canadians, considering the vast knowledge that aboriginal Canadians had to offer us. Take the environment as an example. Sustainability is a word that we have been hearing a lot of in the recent years. The environmental degradation of our planet has reached an alarming level, but sustainability is a concept that is a foundation of aboriginal culture. The need to respect the land is paramount. Non-native cultures are only waking up to this concept at a time when it is almost too late for us.
We may have been in a different situation had we only listened to the knowledge that was being offered to us by the first nation aboriginal communities, but the government is incapable of listening to them, and that is the problem. If it would only listen to the survivors, it could not deny that an apology is necessary to start the healing process.
The government has decided to perpetuate the cycle of mistrust and that has been devastating to these communities.
This is a black mark on Canadian history, one that has left a legacy of despair and suffering for aboriginal Canadians. We need a government that is willing to move forward. We need a government that understands that to acknowledge the mistakes of the past it must take the first step and apologize.
Consider some of the situations some of these communities had to endure. Whether it was 100 miles away by road from the school or a 1,000 miles away by air, families were separated. Parents did not know how their children would fare. Communications were almost non-existent back in the days when this started, and for many in the remote sites, communication is still difficult.
These families who were separated need an apology. Really, this is what started the era of mistrust between some of these communities, the ones in the south and the remote ones in the north, and mistrust of the outside world and other religions. They did not know, everything that happened to them would be a problem. Communities started to split apart, some for religious reasons.
Today, as I travel in northern Ontario I can still see those divides over some of the issues that were created by residential schools. Nibinamik, Neskantaga and North Spirit are communities that split off from the original six large communities in the north and generally split along religious lines by some of the difficulties that they were trying to work through.
There are many instances where not only families were separated, entire communities were separated from each other as they fought to strive and deal with some of the situations. These communities, when we think of it, had been together for centuries. For literally centuries they had managed to co-exist, work together and live together. The residential schools have driven them apart forever.
The mistrust of the outside communities and some of the religions is very apparent in my riding. We have communities that only follow one religion and basically have split off from other communities, simply because of the pain and suffering through residential schools. Really, they are ready to start over. They need and want a process that will allow them to put this behind them and allow them to start the healing process. What they need to start this off is an apology.
What about today's problems? When we consider what is going on in some of the communities and some of the challenges they have of distance, geography and language barriers, now they have the challenge of generations that grew up in the residential schools and the damage that was done to the family unit.
Those children were taken out of their homes or close-knit communities. Now they are back raising their own families. It is not just a situation of one group, one generation, it is more than that. We continue the problem every day as these former children of residential schools raise their own families. So many were damaged for life and the damage continues. We need to stop the damage. We need to start the healing process that we all talk about. We really need to have an apology from the government, so we could start moving the issue forward.
The children who came from residential schools were sent back to their own communities. They were further divided and it put more distance between them. Poplar Hill, North Caribou and Fort Hope were communities that split off because the children who came home to raise families in either community were damaged by the residential school issues. All of them, in every community, cannot understand the reason why the government cannot apologize.
There was an agreement put in place by the former Liberal government. We wanted to do the right thing. We wanted to make sure the process was followed, that the three pillars were followed. We wanted to ensure an apology was issued by the Prime Minister, so the residents knew that we were starting the process.
What do we have now? We have no apology. We have a process that is only partly completed and we have families, communities, elders, grandparents, and leaders of the community that see that the process will not be fully completed. They really want to hear that the Government of Canada is for them. They really want to know that the Prime Minister will apologize which will allow the process to start. We do not need any more problems. We need these families to make their futures brighter and their family lives stronger.
Now, when we actually finalize the Liberal solution to the dark days of residential schools, all we are asking for is one simple last thing for the Prime Minister to do, which is to apologize. Aboriginal Canadians were forced out of their homes, their communities. They were forced to go to a place they did not want to go to and forced to participate in something they did not want to do at the time. They are all asking the same question, what can we do now? We can apologize.
