Jackson Lafferty: Annual General Meeting of the Council of Ministers of Education Q&A

Thank you for joining me, whether here in person or via telephone, for this media update.

I am here to talk to you about the 104th Annual General Meeting of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada – or CMEC, for short. I am very proud to be able to host delegates from all over Canada over the coming days.

This meeting is also very special to me on a personal level. That’s because at last year’s CMEC meeting, my Alberta counterpart and I submitted a joint national strategy to speed up CMEC’s efforts to reduce the gap in academic achievement and graduation rates between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students.

The plan was approved and we are busy implementing its actions.

Our national plan builds on existing work and challenges all of us to take concrete actions that focus on the history and legacy of residential schools and related teacher training. 
We have invited Aboriginal educators and Elders from across Canada to tell us how to encourage more Aboriginal people to pursue a teaching career. We are also asking what we can do to ensure that seasoned Aboriginal educators remain in the profession. We have approximately 75 delegates coming from every corner of the country to participate.

We need more Aboriginal teachers who serve as positive role models and mentors and more aboriginal students to choose teaching as a career.

Culturally relevant education and authentic educators are so important when it comes to reconciliation.

As Justice Murray Sinclair of the TRC stated, “there can be no reconciliation without education.”

This is a principle the NWT fully supports.

One concrete way of doing that was by launching the first comprehensive mandatory residential schools teaching resource in Canada in 2012, in partnership with the Government of Nunavut, the TRC and the Legacy of Hope.

Using survivors’ stories, the mandatory curriculum resource explores the history and legacy of residential school and a path to reconciliation. It was well received across the country, and a number of jurisdictions are following suit.

All teachers in the NWT have now been trained in the history and legacy of residential schools and we have taken important steps to ensure that all teachers get the training in order to be able to teach here.

We are very pleased to have been the first in the country to address this much needed action, one that is central to the TRC recommendations.

Recommendation 63 in fact calls on CMEC to maintain an annual commitment to Aboriginal education issues, including the development of residential school curricula, sharing best practises on teaching students about residential schools and Aboriginal history and identifying teacher-training needs to teach these subject matters.

A lot of work supports the 94 recommendations of the TRC and all governments will require some time to understand them and to act on them.

The important thing is that we accept our respective responsibilities to do our part and right the wrongs that so many aboriginal people have experienced. We cannot change the past but we can sure work on building a better future for all Canadians.

And we have taken the first steps and will continue to walk alongside the TRC, as partners.

As a matter of fact, the TRC has accepted our invitation to join education Ministers from across the country to continue our dialogue.

We are pleased to have them by our side as we take the next step in our journey to honour the work of the TRC and all the people who have shared their stories with them.

It is now up to us to do our part in building a just society that all Canadians can be proud of.

I am looking forward to both the discussions next week with my fellow Ministers, and to hear of the outcomes from the Aboriginal Educators’ Symposium.

Masi.