Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to talk about an issue that has garnered increased national attention over the past few years, that being sterilization without proper prior consent. Unfortunately, the concept of either forced or coerced sterilization of women is not a new phenomenon for Canada, nor is it solely a part of our history. In fact, there is mounting evidence across our country that proves just how far this practice has reached and, in some cases, continues to reach.
Mr. Speaker, let's consider the history of coerced sterilization in Canada. In two provinces, this practice was lawful, as it was enshrined in law for Alberta and British Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s. A Parliamentary inquiry from the mid-70s public documents reveal that the federal government was also facilitating a soft program of sterilization across the NWT and Nunavut through the 1960s and 1970s. In that time, the number of women who were sterilized without full knowledge or consent was in the thousands, and that is not even counting the number of women who may have been sterilized without even knowing it, let alone the number of undocumented sterilizations that occurred off the record books.
Mr. Speaker, while it may sound like the practice of coerced sterilization is firmly behind us, it still persists today, as evidenced by two class-action lawsuits currently being litigated in Alberta and Saskatchewan for hundreds of millions of dollars. Between the two cases, there are hundreds of Indigenous women who have alleged coerced sterilization over the years, with some alleging as recently as December 2018, to have occurred. Additionally, prosecutors involved in these cases have noted numerous other records of coerced sterilization in Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. In fact, the same issue was brought up in this House in 1998 by a former Member, who talked about an NWT woman who had undergone sterilization unbeknownst to her after delivering a child at the Charles Camsell Hospital in Alberta. Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted