OTTAWA -- Justice Murray Sinclair says the entire country must join a journey to reconciliation between aboriginals and non-aboriginals.
The head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Tuesday wound up a six-year odyssey that chronicled decades of suffering and tragedy in thousands of pages of testimony from victims of the residential school system.
He ended it at with a clarion call for action at a formal ceremony marking the delivery of the commission's final report.
"Change, of course, will not be immediate," he said. "It will take years, perhaps generations, but it is important for Canadians to start somewhere and ultimately to create those tools of reconciliation that will live beyond today."
A survivor in the audience wept as Sinclair spoke of how the commission's work changed his life and those of his two fellow commissioners.
With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looking on, Sinclair spoke of a country that has a long journey ahead of it.
"Achieving reconciliation ... is like climbing a mountain; we must proceed one step at a time,"he said.
"It will not always be easy, there will be storms, there will be obstacles, we will fall down from time to time. But we cannot allow ourselves to be daunted by the task because our goal is a just one and it is also necessary for our children."
He says the commission's findings make clear that the myriad problems of aboriginal communities are rooted, directly or indirectly, in years of government efforts to "assimilate, acculturate, indoctrinate and destroy."
"When it comes to engineering the lives of indigenous people in this country, governments have shown a disdainful mistrust of indigenous capacity and a breezy belief in their own," he said.
