Ottawa to pursue settlements with residential school survivors that suffered student-on-student abuse

OTTAWA — The federal government will offer new payouts to about 240 residential school survivors who were unfairly compensated for alleged student-on-student abuse, the Star has learned.
Crown-Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett was set to announce the move Tuesday, which will see the government pursue negotiated settlements with former students who “may not have received fair compensation” for abuse perpetrated by other students at the notorious church-run schools for Indigenous children.
This means that roughly 240 student-on-student abuse claims will be settled outside the special process for compensation, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), where claimants need to show that they reported this abuse to a school staff member, or that a staff member should have known it was going on — a higher bar for compensation than is required in staff-on-student cases, which only need to show that the abuse occurred.
“The abuse suffered by former residential school students is tragic and unacceptable,” Bennett said in a statement to the Star. “We will continue to work with survivors and their representatives to bring closure to this dark and tragic chapter in Canadian history as we continue on the shared path of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.”
The announcement was slated for the same day that the years-long case involving former St. Anne’s Residential students returns to court in Toronto. Former students from the school have been arguing their compensation claims should be reopened because the government withheld thousands of police and court documents relating to abuse at the school until an Ontario judge ordered their release in 2014.
In January, however, a B.C. Supreme Court Justice ruled that compensation claims that have already been closed can’t be reopened if new evidence comes to light.
That ruling details how an adjudicator at the IAP had underscored “systemic prejudice” against claimants of student-on-student whose cases are closed before all evidence is available to the panel. It outlines a claim from an unnamed former student whose request to re-open a compensation claim for student-on-student abuse was denied in 2014 because of failure to prove “the requisite staff knowledge” that abuse was going on. Another compensation claim was blocked from being reviewed because, while an adjudicator determined that student-on-student abuse occurred on school premises, the claimant couldn’t prove whether staff knew or should have known about the abuse.
Sen. Murray Sinclair, the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that examined the impact of Canada’s residential school system, has said student-on-student abuse remains a taboo subject in some communities. He told that The Canadian Press last year that, “many people didn’t want to talk to (the commission) about student-on-student abuse because they were often still living in the community with their abuser.”
More than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools from the late 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Children were taken from their parents and home communities as part of a long-standing government effort to extinguish Indigenous languages and cultures that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission deemed “cultural genocide.”
An unknown number of students — estimated to be in the thousands — died while attending the schools, and thousands experienced physical and sexual abuse, according to the commission.