SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Canada’s Broken Promises

Honourable senators, I rise, as I often do, to draw attention to another issue for which I have sought answers for nearly three years.

The issue I am speaking to is not simply about the location of chief firearms officers, nor is it about whether the government honoured its commitment to appoint resident CFOs in the three territories. This is about something far more troubling: Canada’s recurring failure to act on its own findings, honour its own commitments and deliver on the expectations it creates.

The greatest injustice is not that Indigenous Peoples have not been heard; it is that they have been heard for generations. Their words exist. The evidence exists. The recommendations exist. The commitments exist. Section 35 of the Constitution Act; historical and modern treaties; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, Calls to Action; and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, or MMIWG, Calls to Justice all exist.

Indigenous Peoples should not bear the burden of identifying injustices, proving their existence, proposing solutions and then spending generations advocating for governments to fulfill obligations they have already recognized.

A commitment should not require a lifetime of advocacy to become a reality. And reconciliation cannot mean that Indigenous Peoples carry both the burden of suffering the inequity and the burden of demanding its correction.

Too often, Indigenous Peoples are thanked for their testimony, resilience, patience and partnership. Yet gratitude without action becomes another form of delay. When delay follows decades of testimony, inquiries, reports and promises, it ceases to be administrative; it becomes a perpetuation of harm, compounding intergenerational trauma and eroding faith that justice will ever arrive.

I struggle to find comfort in the word “reconciliation,” not because I question its importance but because it has too often become convenient language. It appears in speeches, strategies, reports and announcements. It is invoked to signal progress and good intentions. It is spoken without requiring action and accountability.

Some may hear frustration in my words and mistake it for cynicism. It is not. I am not jaded by Canada but shaped by my experience within it.

I am profoundly defined by my life as an Inuk, by the stories of my family, my Elders, my communities and generations of people who endured hardship without surrendering hope, carried responsibility without surrendering dignity and refused to stop believing in a better future.

My perspective is not born of bitterness, nor is it born merely of observation. It is born of experience.

I have seen what happens when promises are kept. I have also seen what happens when they are not.

I have watched communities solve problems not because they have every resource they need, but because they have no choice. I have watched people show remarkable patience while waiting for decisions that should have come long ago.

I have watched Northern and Indigenous communities continue to demonstrate strength, resilience and generosity despite challenges that many Canadians never face. That experience has not made me cynical. It has made me unwilling to confuse words with action and unwilling to celebrate intentions while communities wait for results. More importantly, it has made me unwilling to accept that asking governments to honour their commitments is somehow unreasonable.

At some point, reconciliation must stop being Indigenous homework and start becoming government responsibility.

The measure of a nation is not whether it can recognize an injustice but whether it is willing to inconvenience itself to correct it.

Quyanainni, mashi, thank you.