The Path to Reconciliation Act

On Tuesday March 8, I spoke on Bill 4: The Path to Reconciliation Act.   I spoke of the importance of including the calls to action from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls into those to be reviewed under the Path to Reconciliation Act.  I emphasized the importance of reconciliation and in particular the importance of addressing the high rate of violent crime in Manitoba and the low rate of grad 12 graduation for Indigenous students in Manitoba.   The statistics in these areas have not changed in many years of NDP and PC government in Manitoba.

 

Bill 4–The Path to Reconciliation Amendment Act

 

Hon. Jon Gerrard (River Heights): The importance of recon­ciliation cannot be overemphasized. The need and the approach that this bill takes, which is in­cluding calls to action from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, is reasonable. But we are still left with many un­answered questions.

      One of the major focuses of the national inquiry into missing and murdered women–Indigenous women and girls was looking at violence against women and girls. And, clearly, we have a problem in Manitoba because we have some of the highest rates of violent crime in all of Canada. In fact, we would be, last time I looked, about twice as high in terms of violent crime rates as the average of the rest of Canada.

      It is not a good record, and the gov­ern­ment has not yet brought forward its approach to reducing violent crime. And successive NDP and Conservative gov­ern­ments have failed to move us in a better direction when it comes to violent crime.

      So there is a disconnect between the approach being suggested here and what is actually happening in Manitoba, and it is time that we had a gov­ern­ment which had a better perspective on how to go from talking about recon­ciliation and talking about doing some­thing to address the calls for action in the national inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and actually achieving results.

* (16:30)

      This is true, not just when it comes to violent crime, but it's also true when it comes to edu­ca­tion. While over the last 20 years, there have been im­prove­ments in the graduation rates for non-Indigenous students in Manitoba, there has been very little change when it comes to the graduation rates for Indigenous students.

And the–sadly, the graduation rates, grade 12, for Indigenous students are about 50 per cent, which is far too low, and the ineffectiveness of the gov­ern­ment of Manitoba which was in place from 1999 to 2015 in moving this at all, has become adequately apparent to observers who've been watching the scene and taking note of what the assessments have shown. And, sadly, there has been little movement under the current gov­ern­ment, from 2016 to the present, in terms of gradua­tion rates for Indigenous students.

      And it's not clear why both NDP and Conservative gov­ern­ments have been such failures in this respect, but it's readily apparent to anybody who looks at this carefully, that there has been a complete failure of edu­ca­tion policy in this respect, and that is one of the major reasons–perhaps the major reason–for the poor overall results for Manitoba.

      So, while we support this legis­lation and the added attention to the calls for action from the inquiry, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, we call for much better approaches which actually get results in terms of violence, reducing violence against women and in terms of results which get results in terms of improving graduation rates for Indigenous students.

      So I conclude with those few comments and thank members for the op­por­tun­ity to say a few words.

      Merci. Miigwech. Dyakuyu.