The reconciliation project is making progress — but not quickly enough for many

While Canada's reconciliation project with Indigenous people is showing signs of progress, it's moving much slower than many had hoped.

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report in 2015, it came with 94 calls to action demanding action by governments across Canada on a wide range of reconciliation initiatives.

Seven years later, only about 10 per cent of those calls have been fully answered. CBC is tracking that progress for readers with its interactive website Beyond 94, which regularly updates the status of each call to action.

But with Canada now marking its second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, everyone involved — the federal minister responsible for Crown-Indigenous relations and Indigenous leaders themselves — is saying it's time to speed things up.

"There's a lot of evidence all over the country of incredibly good work being done at various levels and various sectors of society and that is absolutely a positive response to what we had hoped for," Marie Wilson, one of the three commissioners on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told CBC News.

"I think it's all being too slow and I think the urgency of it all has not adequately dawned on everyone."

Wilson said she fears that elderly Indigenous people may not live to see reconciliation realized.

"The age of survivors is advanced and advancing," she said. "We know that every single day, we are losing survivors who will not see the benefit of some of the bigger things we had hoped for."

Douglas Sinclair, first cousin to former Truth and Reconciliation commissioner Murray Sinclair, is the publisher of Indigenous Watchdog, an independent website that also tracks progress on the 94 calls to action.

His website says that only 11 of the calls to action have been completed (the CBC puts that number slightly higher, at 13). He said the reconciliation project is definitely not on track.

"There are positive things happening, for sure," he told CBC News. "It's just that those positive steps are outweighed, in my view, by the number of problematic actions or lack of actions. So there's definitely a long way to go."

While both Indigenous Watchdog and Beyond 94 say the first call to action — which demands efforts to reduce the number of Indigenous children in foster care — is making gains, Sinclair said it is not doing so fast enough. 

He pointed to recently released census data which said that while Indigenous children only make up 7.7 per cent of children in Canada, they made up 53.8 per cent of children in foster care in 2021 — a number that was almost unchanged from 2016.

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, said governments barely managed to implement any calls to action over the first six years after they were published.