CANADA
The Globe and Mail
GLORIA GALLOWAY AND BILL CURRY
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Jun. 02 2015
A commission established to document the truth of what happened inside Canada’s Indian residential schools will say the goals of the Canadian government that created the institutions amounted to a cultural genocide, sources say.
Justice Murray Sinclair, the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up as part of the settlement agreement with survivors of the former church-run schools, will release his recommendations Tuesday after a five-year inquiry into the sexual, physical and emotional abuse that was rampant within the institutions.
The summary report, which will be followed by a full report later this year, will explain the measures necessary for reconciliation between Canada and its indigenous people, many of whom were permanently scarred by the residential-school experience. It will say that, for more than a century, the central goal of Canada’s aboriginal policy was assimilation “which can best be described as a cultural genocide.”
The pronouncement comes on the heels of a speech last week by Beverley McLachlin, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who said Canada attempted to commit “cultural genocide” against aboriginal peoples in what she described as the worst stain on Canada’s human-rights record.
First Nations leaders and human-rights experts have been actively pressing for at least two years for Canada to recognize that its historical treatment of indigenous people, including nutrition experiments conducted on children at aboriginal residential schools, constituted a genocide. But the government has not been supportive.
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