Words won’t improve Indigenous lives

Re PM renames Ottawa’s historic Langevin Block in gesture of respect for Indigenous peoples, June 22, and How to put Indigenous children first, Opinion, June 23 Thursday’s front-page included a picture of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strutting in front of Parliament, draped in a Métis sash on National Aboriginal Day.

The caption quoted him as saying, “There is a deep pain in knowing that building carries a name so closely associated with the horror of residential schools.”

In Friday’s column by Timmins—James Bay MP Charlie Angus, we are reminded that the government continues to ignore the crisis faced by Indigenous children. Do we not all deserve decent living conditions and health care, as well as clean water and schools?

On Friday, I received a newsletter from my MP. She quotes a statement made by Trudeau a few years ago, one of her favourites: “If we do not give everyone a chance to succeed, we do not live up to the potential of Canada.”

If people living in unhealthy communities, with unsafe water, no secondary schools and a high rate of youth suicide were asked what was more important to them: improving their lives or chang- ing the name of the Langevin Block and giving them an important building in Ottawa (the former U.S. embassy), can anyone possibly think they would choose the latter?

But the PM said, “Look at where we are, across from the eternal flame, at the very heart of our country’s seat of government” and “millions of Canadians and their families will visit . . . and see that, indeed, no relationship is more important to this government than that with Indigenous peoples.”

Are we truly the fools we are being taken for? Will we ever be angry enough to demand decency of our government? Will we wake up the day other countries send us foreign-aid workers and when Doctors Without Borders sets up clinics in northern Canada? Sylvia Bergeron, Toronto