CANADA
Toronto Star
By: Mayana C. Slobodian Published on Wed May 27 2015
On Sunday, the final event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada will kick-off in Ottawa. The truth is, after seven years, many Canadians still don’t really know what this commission is.
The most common misconception is that it was initiated by the government of Canada. There is a sad irony in this, given that Ottawa has ignored and resisted the work of the TRC from the start.
Meanwhile, it has spent the last seven years enacting legislation and policies that, far from rectifying the relationship between Indigenous people and the Canadian government, serve to perpetuate the systemic inequalities that the residential schools worked so hard to entrench.
The TRC wasn’t set up, as many assume, as a PR move or out of the kindness of our prime minister’s heart. Rather, Ottawa was sued into it. In 2007, on behalf of the 80,000 living former students, the Indian Residential School Survivors Society successfully sued the government of Canada and the churches that operated its schools. It took six years, and remains the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. It was the former students themselves who insisted on a truth commission, and it runs on money taken out of that overall settlement.
The relationship between the federal government and the TRC has always been tense. By 2009, all three original commissioners had stepped down citing, among other concerns, objections to meddling from Ottawa. One of the first acts of the next commissioners was to move the headquarters from Ottawa to Winnipeg. The TRC has also taken the federal government to court twice over access to archival documents, and its 2010 interim report criticized the government’s “unacceptable reluctance to co-operate.”
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