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The great Champion of human dignity, Elie Wiesel,
wrote that "For us, forgetting was never an option.
Remembering is a noble and necessary act.
The call of memory, the call to memory reaches us from
the very dawn of history.
No commandment figures so frequently,
so insistently in the Bible.
It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have
received and the evil we have suffered.
An immoral society betrays humanity because it betrays
the basis for humanity, which is memory.
A moral society is committed to memory.
I believe in memory."
And I do believe in memory.
It is memory that gathers us here today because our society,
Canada, is a moral society - not a perfect society but a society
animated by the highest ideals, a belief in the inviolable
dignity of the human person, in a tradition of ordered liberty,
in the idea that all men and women are created equal.
That is why the Government of Canada created the Communities
Historical Recognition Program to create a platform,
a basis upon which to remember, to recognize these periods in
our history where we fell short.
Canadians today are not directly and personally culpable
for mistakes that were made in the past.
But that is not an excuse for collective amnesia.
That is a reason to be very intentional
about collective memory.
But the best way to address that is by telling
the truth about our history.
If we want to celebrate what's best about our history,
if we want to propose Canada as a model for inclusion and
pluralism and dignity of - and dignity of the human person
and respect for fundamental human rights and inclusivity,
then we must be honest with ourselves about those times
in our past when we fell short.
And that is why we launched this project that was funded through
community engagement at the grassroots level dozens of
brilliant works of art, documentary research, films,
plays, books, monuments, online resources,
teaching and educational and curricular resources,
so that we can be honest with ourselves,
we can seek in some symbolic ways to heal scars from the past
but most importantly, so that we can learn from these experiences
to prevent them in the future.
So thank you to everyone involved,
including Immigration Canada's public servants,
committee members who advised my Department,
leaders and members of all the communities involved,
and the artists, researchers, academics,
the - everyone who was involved in the success of this Program.
And while these memories will be transmitted in perpetuity
for the future, ultimately of course the greatest way,
the greatest monument, the greatest way of recognizing what
has happened is to re-dedicate ourselves as a society
never to repeat these mistakes.
To again close where I began with Elie Wiesel,
"Forgetting is never an option.
Remembering is a noble and necessary act.
An immoral society betrays humanity because it betrays
the basis for humanity which is memory.
A moral society is committed to memory.
I believe in memory."
We believe in memory.