REALITY CHECK: Justin Trudeau failing TRC

In the wake of the discovery of 215 children found buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, Canadians want to know what the government is doing.

Well, the reality is the Prime Minister isn’t doing very much:

In the last six years, the Trudeau government has completed just 10 of the 94 recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That’s just 10.6%.

For years, the government has had recommendations like TRC #75 that sets out a path to help restore dignity to Indigenous children who were buried far from their families:

75. We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.

But it wasn’t the Liberal government who made this discovery at the Kamloops Residential School possible – it was a grant from the B.C. government through the Pathways to Health program.

Maybe the PM and his government would have more time to act on this and other TRC recommendations if they’d stop fighting residential school survivors in court and stop challenging a human rights tribunal finding that they discriminated against Indigenous kids in the child welfare system.

Children and their families deserve better.