Leah Gazan rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 21, 2021.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A New Democrat member of Parliament says she will be holding the government accountable after her motion calling on the federal government to recognize Canada’s residential schools as genocide passed with unanimous consent.
“It was historic,” said Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre. “We moved the pendulum in quite an extreme way.”
Her motion, introduced Thursday after Question Period, referred to the United Nations convention on genocide adopted in 1948. It defines genocide as killing members of a group, causing them serious physical or mental harm, placing them under conditions to destroy them, imposing measures to prevent births or forcibly transferring children to another group.
An e-mailed statement from the office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said residential schools are a part of a “shameful and racist colonial policy” that removed Indigenous children from their communities and denied them their families, language and culture.
The government accepts the conclusion from the 2019 inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that the residential system was genocide, the statement said. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also said he accepts those findings.
‘Moving on’ from residential schools requires more than acknowledgment and apologies
Gazan introduced a similar motion last year, not long after the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced possible unmarked graves were located at the site of the former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. At that time, it did not receive unanimous consent.
Gazan said she believes Pope Francis made a significant difference.
Francis apologized multiple times throughout his six-day visit to Canada in July for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in residential schools and other assimilation policies. He acknowledged it was genocide when asked by a reporter on the flight back to Rome.
An estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools over a century. More than 60 per cent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has detailed mistreatment at the schools, including emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children.
The commission’s final report in 2015 labelled what happened as “cultural genocide.” But in the subsequent years, many Indigenous leaders and experts have said it should just be called genocide.
Gazan said she has briefly spoken with people in the Liberal government about next steps. She said there must be consultation with Indigenous people on how best to proceed.
“I think these things need to be done thoughtfully and carefully so that survivors can get the justice that they wait for and still deserve,” she said.