School compensation moves another small step forward

It's been more than five months since the November 2005 announcement that an agreement-in-principle had been reached to pay former residential school students compensation for their experiences within the residential school system.

Finally, on April 25, Jim Prentice, minister of Indian Affairs, announced that all parties involved-government, the Assembly of First Nations, the lawyers for the survivors and the three churches involved in running the schools-had agreed to sign off on the residential school accord. So, with that knowledge in mind, one might be led to believe that money will soon be flowing.
Not so. What is soon for some, is not so soon for others.

The agreement now has to go to Cabinet for review and approval, and then it will go before the courts in nine provinces for their approval, said Steve Brazeau. He is a media relations and public affairs officer with Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada, the federal government department responsible for working to resolve issues surrounding Canada's Indian residential schools.

"I really can't speculate on how long it's going to go through courts," Brazeau said. "I mean, a court process is a court process. We can't really speculate as to how long it's going to take. But one of the steps that we've overcome was that all the parties at the discussions have all agreed to sign. So there's one hurdle that we've overcome."

Steve Brazeau was referring to the fact that early in April the agreement was effectively stalled.
During a press conference in Winnipeg on April 19, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said one of the groups on the Aboriginal side was holding up completion of the package. On April 10, Jim Prentice, minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, had indicated it was one of the law firms involved in putting the agreement-in-principle together. There was much behind the scenes speculation on which law firm it was.

Darcy Merkur is a partner with Thomson, Rogers, the law firm that has been handling the national class action suit on behalf of residential school survivors. Thomson, Rogers was quick to send out a press release that said the hold up wasn't with the National Consortium of Residential School Survivors' Counsels that represent 7,000 former students.

He tells Alberta Sweetgrass now all parties have agreed to sign it's expected the agreement will be before the courts by the summer, and will take effect early in 2007.

While the process of taking the agreement through the court system is a bit of an unknown, he doesn't anticipate any problems.

"You never know what to expect. We're optimistic that the class, the survivors at large, all appreciate that under all the circumstances it's a very good settlement and hopefully there won't be too many stumbling blocks at all."

Under the agreement, students would each receive a common experience payment of $10,000, plus $3,000 for each year they attended a residential school. It also includes a provision that promised to fast-track compensation payments of $8,000 to survivors 65 years of age and older.
It's not clear whether the fast-tracked payments for elderly survivors will go ahead before the agreement receives approval in the courts, Merkur said.

"No one knows the answer. We are waiting to hear what the Conservative government is planning, if anything, with respect to an advance payment to the elderly."

Merkur is concerned with all the misinformation floating around about the compensation process, including rumors that some people have already received their compensation. He wants to set the record straight.

"There's a lot of misinformation in the public, in the media, with the class members, being spread by the people in the communities. A ton of misinformation. We hear stories all the time about people receiving their common experience payments and receiving their advance payments and I can assure you nobody's received either as of this point. So any such rumor is false," he said. "We're here, we're in the know and we're happy to answer questions from survivors or the media at any point to clarify the real situation ...We're very concerned about misinformation and we hope that people check with the right sources."