All professions need mandatory training on residential schools: Commissioner

WINNIPEG – The chairman of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission says all professions should have to undergo mandatory training about Indian residential schools.

Justice Murray Sinclair told a suicide prevention conference in Winnipeg that medical professionals in particular need to understand the legacy of residential schools.

About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and forced to attend the government schools over much of the last century.

Sinclair says judges are legally required to learn about residential schools and the same should be mandatory for anyone working with aboriginal people.

He says he can’t think of a single profession that wouldn’t benefit from a greater understanding of the aboriginal experience in Canada.

The last school closed outside Regina in 1996.