I also congratulate the Canadian government, although I agree with others who suggested that those who gave this apology might have ulterior motives. But few if any politicians have pure motives. Certainly, the motives for involuntarily removing these children & teens from their parents and from their cultures wasn't pure.

This doesn't mean that all or even most of the people associated with these residential facilities and schools were abusive toward these children/teens. However, it does mean that the motivation for these facilities and schools was absolutely wrong, and the conditions under which these institutions were run [for example, under the overarching belief that White cultures were better than aboriginal cultures and therefore with no aboriginal parental and community oversight] was absolutely wrong. The motivation, structure, and operation of these residential facilities provided the opportunities for the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that did occur.

Given the world view and the attitudes that were common in those times, I think that most non-aboriginal people give very little thought to what happened to those children, teens, and their parents because they felt that removing them from their parents and their culture was "for their own good".

I believe that few people probably knew about the physical and/or sexual abuse that occurred to the aboriginal children and teens in these residential facilities & schools. And, given the ethnocentrism and racism of those times, I believe that most people probably didn't understand the emotional abuse that aboriginal children & teens sufferred as a result of first being removed from their parents and cultures and second being indoctrinated to reject that culture, and embrace a culture which despised them. And then to add the short and long term effects of actual physical and/or sexual abuse-if the victims and victims families say that at the very least they want and need an apology, I'm glad that they received it.

Thank goodness, nowadays, most people in the world 'get' that such treatment is inhumane, and by "such treatment" I mean all of it-the involuntary removal of children from their parents simply because of their race/ethnicity as well as the physical and sexual abuse that occurred.