CANADA
Montreal Gazette
By Michelle Lalonde, The Gazette February 7, 2013
MONTREAL — Canadians have a blind spot when it comes to facing, and responding to, the extensive damage done to this country’s native people through the residential school system, a commissioner with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said Thursday.
“Canadians have good hearts,” commissioner Marie Wilson told The Gazette in an interview. “We are the first to jump up to help in places like Haiti and other places around the world where there are tragedies. But we have been taught to be comfortably blind to need when it is in our midst.”
Wilson was in Montreal to announce and invite the public to a “national event” to be held April 24-27 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. This will be the fifth of seven such national events the commission has held across Canada since it was created in 2008 as a result of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history.
Wilson, a former journalist and director with CBC North, was appointed to the commission in 2009 after its original three commissioners resigned. She said she has been dismayed by the lack of attention paid to the commission’s work thus far.
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