Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I am going to speak about something that cannot be done any justice to in two and a half minutes. I confess I was late for work this morning because I got caught up in watching a movie on television that was about social injustice. It was called “A Million Colours” and it was about the social injustice in South Africa with the apartheid. It got me thinking this morning, as I was getting in the shower, late as I was, about social injustice in general and I have so little tolerance for social injustice. When the movie “Schindler’s List” came out about the holocaust, I could not stand to watch it because of the injustice of the acts that were being perpetrated on people.
I got thinking about our country and about our territory, and I got thinking about the social injustice of the policies of previous governments when they came, not so long ago, into our communities in the North and across this country and they took people’s children away from them. That is the past and I know we cannot turn back the clock and we cannot go back and change that, but now in this day and age and today we still live with the fallout from that social injustice. We still live with Aboriginal First Nations people being disproportionately represented in almost every social negative indicator that you can come up with, whether it’s suicide, whether it’s incarceration, whether it’s addiction to drugs and alcohol.
So this atrocity, as it happened, is still with us. It’s alive and well today because people turn to things like drugs and alcohol to mask the pain of this injustice, but our country has never really dealt with that, I don’t believe. Yes, there were apologies made by the Prime Minister and we have recently seen the efforts of the Idle No More movement in trying to communicate some of these things, but I don’t think that our country will ever be healed from this until there is a general societal acceptance of
the fact that there was a grave social injustice perpetrated and we are living with the masked symptoms of that yet today.
Today is Bell satellite or TV or communications Let’s Talk Day to deal with mental illness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has gone a long ways towards let’s talk about what happened in the past. They have done an amazing job of let’s talk about it, but we cannot afford to stop talking about it until we start to see a change. Those of us sitting around this table know all too well what we deal with every day as legislators as a fallout of a grave social injustice that occurred in this territory and in this country, and we need to keep talking about it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
