Utoo Radio with Other News Sources - September 26, 2024 - Leah Gazan, an NDP MP, has introduced a bill to change the Criminal Code so that it is illegal to play down, deny, or excuse the harms of Canada's residential schools.

Gazan introduced the bill a little less than a week before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which honours people who lived through residential schools and their families.

Representative Gazan of Winnipeg Centre thinks that the past of genocide on one side of her family should never be debated, but not for Indigenous People of Canada.

Should Gazan's bill become law, it would be illegal to intentionally stir up hate against Indigenous people "by condoning, denying, justifying, or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada."

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was set up to look into the residential school system, heard from thousands of people who said they had been abused physically, sexually, emotionally, and mentally, and that they had also been malnourished.

More than 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children were taken from their homes and put in these schools as part of a system run by churches and paid for by the government. The commission's final report, which came out in 2015, said that more than 6,000 Indigenous children had died in the institutions, some of them from sickness.