The members of the Canadian House of Commons unanimously approved yesterday a motion asking the federal government to recognize that students in Indigenous residential schools in Canada were victims of genocide. The motion was also submitted by New Democratic Party (left-wing) MP Leah Gazan, who represents the Winnipeg Centre riding in the capital of Manitoba province in west-central Canada. This unanimous parliamentary approval of the mentioned motion comes three months after the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, recognized that Indigenous peoples were indeed subjected to genocide in those residential schools, 60% of which were run by the mentioned church. It is also noted that more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were forced between 1870 and 1997 to attend those schools established and funded by the federal government for Indigenous peoples. The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report also declared that the referenced residential schools constituted a "cultural genocide," detailing physical and sexual abuses, poor living conditions, and cases of malnutrition that prevailed there. Gazan had announced her intention to submit this motion after Pope Francis acknowledged at the end of his visit to Canada late last July that the abuses in Indigenous residential schools amounted to "genocide." Also, Gazan said in the motion she presented that the abuses in residential schools meet the United Nations definition of genocide. Additionally, Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as the intent to destroy "a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part." As for MP Leah Gazan, she was born in Manitoba to a Dutch Jewish father who survived the Holocaust and to a mother of mixed Chinese and Lakota descent. The Lakota people are Indigenous to the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and some U.S. states.