Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to thank Mrs. Groenewegen for bringing forward this motion and also Mr. Rideout, who is also here in the House.
Mr. Speaker, some time ago an incident happened up in Inuvik that saw that this type of procedure didn't happen within the residential school system. In a span of 20 years we had different people in our system that were hurting a lot of boys, and the communities weren't aware of what was happening. You talk about betrayal of trust; you know it's in the community. These men today are in the community and they are working on their own families, healing their own issues and dealing with their own demons because of something like this that didn't happen in the '60s; it happened in the '70s. Finally it got some attention when one of the men spoke up and something like this is devastating.
Certainly, my heart felt, I don't know if it's sympathy, my heart felt sorrow and also appreciation for people in Hay River who had an incident like this in their community in terms of the damage that this one person could have done, or maybe has already done, in Hay River. What are we doing as a government to help that community deal with this issue here? Certainly for myself in Inuvik and Grolier Hall, that it was only after 20 and 30 years that it received some attention as to how this has really impacted our lives, impacted our families. The betrayal of trust was so deeply felt by our people, our mothers and our fathers, on this issue here that things like this happened in a government institution, also in the Roman Catholic run system here and that we ask that this government looks at this motion very strongly and supports this motion in terms of, as Mr. Lafferty has indicated, our precious resources, because this could cause a lot of problems for our people here.
I am too, in terms of support of this motion, to see which way the government will handle this issue here in terms of dealing with it and giving it some awareness and giving some strong messages to the people that work with our children that a situation like this will no longer be tolerated in our small communities. So thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen, for bringing this motion forward.