The Canadian Bahá'í Community Submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

Preface

The Canadian Bahá'í Community is pleased to participate in the final round of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. We wish the Commission all possible success in the development of recommendations. It is clear from the reports of the first three Rounds that the Commission is examining extremely crucial issues facing Canadian society. After studying those reports we have been moved to bring to the attention of the Commission a perspective, along with a few specific observations, which we ask the Commission to consider before preparing its final report.

Before detailing our comments, we want to express the Bahá'í community's appreciation of the impressive efforts which Canada's people and the governing institutions of this land have made over many decades to create a society based on principles of justice. This Commission is but one of the most recent examples of those efforts. Bahá'ís understand many of the complex problems of society to be inevitable features of an historical process which the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá'í Faith foresaw more than a century ago. Bahá'u'lláh's vision of the eventual integration of humankind and the emergence of a global society has been confirmed by the events of this century. While there is an enormous amount of work to be done in Canada to right the wrongs and injustices of the past, and to heal the sorrow and pain of the present, our international experience prompts us to draw the attention of the Commission to the great encouragement to peoples of other lands that has been provided by Canada in its struggles to find solutions to the difficult problems of this exceptional period in the history of human affairs.