CANADA
The Globe and Mail
GLORIA GALLOWAY
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Feb. 04, 2016
The head of Canada’s largest indigenous organization says the government acted counter to its own apology for the treatment of children at Indian residential schools when it used a technical argument to deny compensation to many of those who were abused.
The 2008 apology was made the year after the implementation of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement involving the government, the survivors and the churches that ran the schools. In it, former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper asked on behalf of Canada for the “forgiveness of the aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.”
Two years later, Justice Department lawyers working under Mr. Harper’s government began to argue in compensation hearings that more than 50 of the schools listed in the settlement agreement ceased to be residential schools in the 1950s and 1960s when Ottawa took over the operation of the educational facilities and left the churches responsible for only the dormitories – a move known as the administrative split. Justice lawyers successfully argued that students who were sexually or physically assaulted after that time in any place but the dormitories were not abused at a residential school and were, therefore, not entitled to payment for their suffering.
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