Truth, Reconciliation, and the Shame of the Con Regime

They are images that should haunt every Canadian. Native children taken away from the parents by the RCMP and sent to residential schools with more cemeteries than playgrounds.

And even though our generation wasn't to blame for that story of brutality and attempted cultural genocide, we can't look away or ignore the problem.

Because it is still an open wound that needs healing.

And as the Globe points out, it was, it is, and it will always be our story. Canada's story. 

Close your eyes and imagine you are at home with your two children, a boy aged six and a girl aged eight. There’s a knock at the door. It’s a moment you’ve dreaded for weeks. You answer it and there is a man from the government and an RCMP officer who order you to turn your children over to them immediately.

It's a story that couldn't be more painful. 

That night, you are alone with your spouse in an empty house, brokenhearted, powerless and without hope, everything that matters stolen by the state.



Or more horrifying.

Now imagine you are one of the children. You are driven hundreds of kilometres to a new school run by strangers. When you arrive, your hair is cut off and the clothes your mother made you are taken from you and burned. You are punished every time you speak your mother tongue or cry for your parents.

You are underfed, cold. There is no playground outside, just a cemetery for the children who died in the care of this horrible place.

No country could run away from a story like that one. And to blame its victims is both ignorant and obscene.

A poll in 2013 showed that 60 per cent of Canadians believe that First Nations, Inuit and Métis people are the authors of their own problems.

Not when racism is still a big problem in Canada.

So now is the time for action not more empty promises, or more indifference.



This country needs to be shaken out of its indifference. It needs to acknowledge a dark history that Canada authored. Canadians must consider how to remedy the harm that we – Canadians – caused.

And what must also be said is that we will never arrive at that moment of reconciliation, and our precious native people will never have a better future, as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent much of Tuesday's question period defending his government's work on aboriginal affairs as the opposition challenged him on the results of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings. But Harper wouldn't commit to any of the 94 recommendations outlined in the summary report, released Tuesday morning.

Because he would rather cater to the racism of his rabid base, he doesn't give a damn about the poorest and most vulnerable Canadians. 

And would spend a billion dollars on his porky propaganda, but not a penny on an inquiry into this modern aboriginal horror story.



And the reaction of his Indian Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, when the head of the Commission said we do need an inquiry into those missing and murdered women.

Says all we need to know about his foul Con regime...



You know when I was boy and living in another country, I used to think of Canada as a land of mountains, bears, Mounties, hockey players, cowboys, and Indians.

If I had been asked to choose which of those things I thought made Canada sound most interesting, and a place I'd like to live in, I would have said native people. 

And I've never changed my opinion. Their history, their culture, have have helped make Canada Canada. And in my eyes more interesting and beautiful.

So let's get rid of that ghastly Con regime, and work for that glorious day of reconciliation.

Let's confront our history, not try to bury it. Let's embrace our precious native people, not reject them...



Let's give this tragic Canadian story, our story, the happy ending it so desperately needs...

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