The chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission says the sheer number of documents they still need to receive from the federal government may make it very difficult for the commission to complete its work within the required mandate.
Justice Murray Sinclair was speaking before the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples in Ottawa last night.
He stopped short of saying the TRC needs an extension of its mandate — but Sinclair says organizing and analyzing the high number of documents, most of which they have yet to receive, will be a daunting task for the commission to complete within the required time frame.
“If we get all of the documents today, there is a real serious question as to whether we can complete all the analysis by the time our mandate expires in July of next year,” he says. “But it would depend on whether we’re able to do enough of an analysis to be able to complete the report.”
TRC commissioner Willie Littlechild also spoke to the committee.
He says the commission has documented to date 4,134 children who died or disappeared while attending residential schools, and this is yet another reminder of one of the darkest legacies of Canadian history.
“You may not know that thousands of them died at the schools and went missing,” he says. “We’ve heard many testimonies. I heard myself from survivors who witnessed the deaths of some of these children. Children burying children, some of them died running away from schools.”
The TRC’s five-year mandate expires in roughly 13 months.