New study proves CEP process weighed heavily on survivors

It’s important, said Gwen Reimer, lead investigator with Praxis Research Associates, that people don’t take away the wrong message from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s newest report.

Just because more residential school survivors claimed to have positive experiences with the Common Experience Payment (CEP), it shouldn’t be assumed that these experiences outweigh the negative impacts of the CEP, she said.

“We wanted to make sure that nobody read this report, looked only at those numbers and said, ‘Well, look, more people thought it was positive than negative.’ You really have to take a look at what they’re saying and how they’re saying it as opposed to merely the number of people saying it,” said Reimer.

On March 31, the foundation released “The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing,” a follow-up to the 2007 report, “Lump Sum Compensation Payments Research Project.”

The latest report gathered data on the impact of CEP on the survivors and their engagement in healing, as well as the roles of support services in assisting applicants during the compensation process.

Nearly 300 survivors, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, were interviewed for the study and all were forthcoming in sharing their experiences. Reimer said that even more came forward to tell their stories, but investigators had to turn them down.

“I think people were eager to share their experiences about the process, particularly if they were not very satisfied with the process . . . . This was really the only opportunity for them, one on one, to say, ‘First I go through the residential school thing and then the compensation process itself has re-victimized me in some way.’ …There was an eagerness to share those stories,” said Reimer.

What surprised her most was that right across the country survivors were telling similar stories. “People’s experiences are quite common, which is ironic in terms of what we were evaluating here. People from Nova Scotia were saying many of the same things as individuals from the Yukon, for example,” said Reimer.

The findings of the report are stark. Noted in the summary, “Over a third of the study group shared that the CEP process triggered negative emotions or traumatic flashbacks. The most common explanation was that completing the applications brought back negative memories and opened old wounds. Survivors described reactions to these memories that ranged from feelings of discomfort and loneliness to reactions of panic and depression, sometimes leading to self-destructive behaviors.”

It’s because of this that Reimer is adamant in saying that the initial satisfaction of buying something with the CEP dollars, like a boat or a car, does not outweigh the heavier, deeper impacts the CEP money had on the residential school survivors.

“You have to take a look at the kinds of positive impacts people are talking about. They’re generally quite temporal,” said Reimer. “But the quality of those positive impacts can be interpreted as less profound in terms of a person’s life experience than the negative impacts.”

Almost half of the survivors interviewed said that receiving the CEP money was both a positive and negative experience.

“Fundamentally, this dualism characterized CEP as positive because it relieved financial stress and afforded opportunities to share with family or to make necessary and desired purchases,” reads the report, “but also negative because these benefits did not outweigh the sense of injustice in the ‘10 plus 3’ compensation formula nor did they alleviate the pain of triggered emotions and memories of trauma from their residential school years.”

Reimer also noted that survivors expressed concern that while residential schools had an intergenerational bearing, compensation was provided only for the student.

The study also examined support services provided for survivors during the CEP process. More than 40 per cent of the study group relied mainly on non-CEP specific supports, such as family, friends and local resources. Respondents noted that they received support and assistance from Aboriginal Healing Foundation-funded community-based healing projects.

Funding for the foundation was not included in the most recent federal budget and the foundation has been forced to close its community projects. However, it did budget operational dollars for its 12 healing centres, which will continue to operate for another two years.

The survey that resulted in “The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing” report was carried out over a 10-month period. CEP payments began in 2007 and the study took place a year later.