Whereas:

• Approximately 182 unmarked graves have been found at St. Eugene's Mission School, a former residential school in Canada.
• Approximately 751 unmarked graves have been found at the Marieval Indian Residential School, a former residential school in Canada.
• Approximately 215 unmarked graves have been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a former residential school in Canada.
• The Canadian government continues to publicly fund the Catholic school system in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario; these schools continue to commit abuses on Canadian soil.

We, the survivors of the Canadian Catholic school system, call upon the Government of Canada to abolish the Canadian Catholic school system. In the aftermath of the discovery of over 1,000 unmarked graves where the bodies of Indigenous children--wrenched from their families and forced to endure severe neglect and violence--have been hidden by the residential school system, we call upon the Canadian government to end the public funding of all Catholic schools on Canadian soil. These schools continue to perpetuate a legacy of negligence, intolerance of difference, forced assimilation, as well as physical, emotional, and sexual abuses. As a survivor of one such school--St.Patrick's Catholic School in Ajax, Ontario--I ask the Canadian government to recognize the entrenched legacy of violence that remains within the school system today. While this will not end the incalculable amount of trauma that has been amassed, this step will put an end to the institutions that have perpetuated and overseen significant horrors to bodies and minds, living and dead.