What does this day mean to you personally when Canadians honor survivors and remember the children, remembers the li- remember the lives lost? What responsibility should follow, um, uh, should follow this, and where do you see the greatest distance between the language of reconciliation and people's daily lives?

Well, uh, to tell you the truth, Avi, um, I, I see a lot of difference between what Canada talks about in terms of reconciliation, what people think of reconciliation.

You don't have to go any further than look at one of the, at, any social media posts and where they ask various peoples what reconciliation means to them.

Um, what it means to me is, uh, very much what it meant to the Jewish people and Israel, and that would have been recognition of our rights to, uh, our land, and I know we don't get all of Canada back.

Uh, the, the treaties have welcomed people here, and they have a, they have a right to be here.

So but I would say that, oh, there is land that we would have, and some of it very traditional, and, uh, we should have that land, and we should have the right for self-determination on that land.

That's the, the big picture of reconciliation.

Mm-hmm

What has really driven you to be so vocal about this?

That's an interesting question.

You know, people take parts of our history and they like to compare it and like to suggest that they're the same thing as us.

And the indigenous people of Canada started off as a relationship, which was equality, friendship, treaties.

We were going to... move through the history of Canada together, each representing their own cultures and their way of life, their own language, everything like that.

We lived by that for 300 years on this continent.

And it was only the British who subsequently decided that they wanted to make us subjects rather than allies.

Do you mind elaborating on that a little bit?

Mm.

And we started it, I, I remember Irwin Cotler and I last year, we talked about it.

And in, in this whole idea of indigeneity came up and how important it was, especially to us, uh, the indigenous people of Canada.

It became clear to me that what Israel had and has is what indigenous people around the world want.

I mean, we're, I'm in my own country right now.

I live on lands that my ancestors, uh, probably walked 10,000 years ago, but it's not mine.

It's not, it's not...

I guess I wanna ask you, why do you think that narrative has gained so much traction? And maybe if you can just explain in more detail what it gets wrong, both about Jewish history, but also, as you say, about indigenous history, which many people are still kind of grappling with and don't know the full extent of.