After all these decades, Indigenous\u002DCanadians are still dying of preventable disease
While the Pope was meeting with several thousand former residential-school students and survivors of abuse at the site of the former Ermineskin residential school in Maskwacis, Alta., on Monday, the Trudeau government was announcing a $68.9-million treatment centre for the mercury-poisoning victims of a Dryden, Ont., pulp and paper mill’s contamination of the Wabigoon River.
“I have come to your native lands to tell you in person of my sorrow, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, to express my closeness and to pray with you and for you,” Pope Francis told his hosts in Maskwacis. Building on earlier apologies for the forced relocation of Inuit communities in the Far North, in 2019, Trudeau apologized for “the federal government’s management of tuberculosis in the Arctic” from the ’40s to the ’60s. Trudeau promised a series of initiatives in health and housing, and efforts to locate the grave sites of Inuit who were sent south for treatment but never came home. “We’re also providing money to mark graves and create plaques,” Trudeau said.
In the immediate aftermath of shocking headlines about a “mass grave” discovered at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on May 27, 2021, Trudeau and Carolyn Bennett, who was Crown-Indigenous relations minister at the time, insisted that Pope Francis should issue an apology more explicit than Pope Benedict’s 2009 expression of sorrow about the role of Catholic institutions in running residential schools.
When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its “calls to action” in 2015, Trudeau said he would act on all of them. Several of those calls to action directly related to resolving the mystery around “missing children” from the residential-school years and properly marking and commemorating residential-school grave sites. By the time the “mass grave” story broke six years later, the Trudeau government had spent less that $7 million of a mere $33.
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