CANADA
VICE News
By Justin Ling
December 16, 2015
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expecting to have a tete-a-tete with the head of the Catholic Church in order to ask for his Holiness to apologize for the century of abuse inflicted on Canada’s indigenous people in the church-run residential schools.
Trudeau made the promise to ask for Pope Francis’ mea culpa on Wednesday, after a meeting designed to start the process towards reconciliation between Ottawa and the generations of Aboriginal people who were taken from their homes and forced into a residential school system rife with abuse.
The start of the “new era” of Canada’s relationship with the territory’s Aboriginal peoples comes after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report on Tuesday. Amongst its 4,000 pages of testimony and historical accounts were 94 calls to action, drawing a roadmap for how Canada could repair its fractured relationship with its indigenous peoples.
Those recommendations were sketched out in an interim report, published last June. The report called on the government to do everything from re-invest in Aboriginal media to bridge the health gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians.
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