Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be supporting the motion. I attended residential school, but the greatest impact upon me in residential school has been the fact that my father attended residential school. I grew up as a kid listening to some incredible stories of abuse at residential schools. If my father was alive today he would be 80 years old. A lot of people who are in their late 70s and early 80s need an opportunity to tell about the incredible abuse that occurred in the schools.
My father went to St. Joseph Residential School, I think it was called St. Joseph, in Fort Resolution and he told us many stories about the amount of abuse that individuals in the school had. I just want to repeat one story very quickly here.
One time my father said that a young boy would work in the kitchen. They ate mostly fish. But when he went into the kitchen the smell was so great from bacon cooking in the morning that the kid stole a piece of bacon. When he got caught they drove holes in the bacon, strapped it to his back, put a sign on his chest that said “I’m a thief” and he had to walk around for one week with that bacon tied to his back. Just to give you an idea of some of the stories that we’ll hear from people who are in their early 80s that attended residential school. I think the people who ran the residential schools at that time felt they had the right and obligation to abuse the kids that were in school.