Poll: Genocide?
Castanet Staff – August 2, 2022 / 7:30 PM | History: 378370
Photo: The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick
Leah Gazan stands up during question period in the House of Commons in 2021. The federal NDP MP says she hopes all her colleagues will now acknowledge what happened in the genocide homes after the system was recently called one by the Pope Francis.
A New Democrat MP said on Tuesday she hoped all her colleagues would recognize the boarding school system as genocide after Pope Francis used the term.
Leah Gazan, who represents downtown Winnipeg, tried last year to get unanimous consent from MPs in the House of Commons to pressure the Canadian government to call what happened in the homes a genocide.
Her proposal refers to the UN Convention on Genocide, adopted in 1948, which defines genocide as killing members of a group, causing serious physical or mental injury, placing them in conditions for their destruction, imposing measures to prevent births or forcibly transferring children to another group.
At the time, Ghazan said Canada’s residential school policy met all five criteria, but some votes in the House of Commons said no, so her motion, requiring unanimous approval, failed.
“The ongoing debate about the experiences of school survivors is another act of violence,” Ghazan said in an interview Tuesday.
“We have to keep that in mind.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 2015 final report called what happened in the dorms a “cultural genocide,” but some Indigenous leaders have since said it should be called genocide, without the qualifying adjective.
During his six-day visit to Canada last week, Pope Francis apologized repeatedly for the “evil” of what happened inside the schools. But it wasn’t until the Pope was asked about it by reporters on the flight to Rome that he said he considered it genocide.
Francis said he felt “genocide” was a technical term when asked why he didn’t say it in Canada.
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