A good summary of one of the Canadian senate's most infamous faces and their immensely ignorant statements: http://www.chatelaine.com/opinion/lynn-beyak-senator/
Beyak — a business owner from northern Ontario who ran twice as a candidate for the provincial Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s — wrote this letter after a summer she promised would be spent meeting with Indigenous groups, as a way to address uninformed and offensive statements she made about residential schools earlier this year. But this is the sentiment that emerged from Beyak's soul-searching: ”Trade your status card for a Canadian citizenship," she advised Aboriginal people. Beyak — a senator, remember — had to be told that Aboriginal people born in Canada are citizens, and that having Indian status does not preclude a person from being Canadian.
So, another serious question: Is it possible that Beyak is getting dumber over time? Back in the spring, she criticized the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's inquiry into the residential school system — which seized 150,000 Indigenous children from their families as part of a government campaign of forcible assimilation — as being unfair, because it didn't ”focus on the good."
”I speak partly for the record," Beyak said in March, ”but mostly in memory of the kindly and well-intentioned men and women and their descendants — perhaps some of us here in this chamber — whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged for the most part."
My grandfather was taken away from his family to attend a residential school. He later fled the country and joined the US military to gain citizenship. He was later captured and tortured as a POW in Korea. And then years down the line the ravages of PTSD led him to commit suicide.
But yeah these programs did some good things as well. My mother and her siblings deserve more than a half assed apology from the Canadian government.