On December 7, 2009, the first reading for the federal motion, Year of the British Home Child, will take place at roughly 5:30 pm Ontario, Canada, time.

Everyone that can, should tune into the Parliament Channel to view the proceedings. It is possible that the taping may have to switch to view a different proceeding going on at the same time frame, which there is no control over.

However, to explain to those who do not know, the motion will be read, then Mr McColeman will speak on the motion for 10 minutes. IF NO ONE rises to question or debate this motion, and after a period of time passes (with no comment), then the speaker of the house will request the vote take place. At this point it will be the final step.

Now if anyone questions or debates the motion it will have to be carried over to the second reading. Attempts are being made to bring this second reading in place on or before December11, 2009, the final day of this year's session. Let's all hope that after all the support we have from our MP's that it will go through without a hitch on December7th.

by LEROY PEACH
The Cape Breton Post

Reproduced thorugh the generosity of The Cape Breton Post

This year marks the 140th anniversary of the arrival of the British home children in the Maritimes, the descendants of whom now make up 12 per cent of the Canadian population.

On Oct, 17, approximately 130 Cape Breton descendants gathered at Cape Breton University to celebrate the considerable successes and occasional heartbreak that their parents and grandparents experienced in Canada.

One of the speakers was Beryl Young, a writer of young adult fiction, who came from British Columbia on a nation-wide tour to promote her book Charlie: A Home Child’s Life in Canada.

Young’s book is the compelling story of her father Charles Harvey, who arrived in Canada from Britain in 1911 at the age of 13. It was only in the late 1950s that Young learned that Charlie was a home child. As a result, there were many questions that she regrets not having asked him. Nevertheless, she is able to weave her story around known personal facts about Charlie and historical information about British home children, thereby bringing Charlie’s experience to life.

Bindoon Boys Town: The sad truth behind Britain's lost children

Australia is to apologise for the appalling treatment meted out to thousands of boys and girls shipped to its shores as orphans

By Kathy Marks in Sydney

Bindoon Boys Town: it sounded like an adventure camp to the pale-faced youngsters who emerged blinking into the sunlight at Fremantle, in Western Australia, after their six-month voyage from Southampton. Among them was Laurie Humphreys, looking forward to his new life in the "land of milk and honey", where food was plentiful and children rode to school on horses, so he had been told.

It was September 1947, and the SS Asturias had just docked in Fremantle with 147 boys and girls, the first to arrive under a post-war plan to empty overflowing British orphanages and repopulate the former colonies with "good white stock". Humphreys and other boys were dispatched to Bindoon, an isolated institution 60 miles north of Perth, run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic lay order.