The politics of compensation

There was a little flurry of concern in the first week of May when reports in mainstream newspapers suggested the Minister of Indian Affairs was thinking of creating a mass compensation package for victims of residential schools.

Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart, the reports said, was ready to put together a deal similar to the $1.1 billion package that has been offered to tainted blood victims, infected with the Hepatitis C virus, because the federal government has been hit with nearly 1,000 lawsuits related to residential schools.

Minister Stewart's staff fired off a denial of those reports the next day. A department communications official confirmed that the government was worried that any hint that residential school compensation would follow the same politically-disastrous route as the Hepatitis C compensation package would cause an uproar in Aboriginal communities.

Toni Timmermans, Indian Affairs' communications manager for British Columbia, sent out a hastily-typed note to the press which did not go through the usual approval procedures reserved for press releases. The note said the mainstream stories were "not true."

Timmermans told Windspeaker that Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine, Indian Affairs officials and Justice department officials are looking at alternative dispute measures that are intended to make it easier for Aboriginal victims to go through the compensation process.

Timmermans made available a word-for-word transcript of what the Indian Affairs minister said, to dispel the un-truths previously reported.

"The discussions we've been having are looking at alternative dispute mechanisms and trying to understand if there are modern ways of dealing with these issues," Stewart is quoted as saying. "Those, as I say, are continuing. They are being held in partnerships as is our approach. If there are some positive resolutions, that will be good. But, having said that, I think it's important to have something available that's on the ground and that's what we've done with the $350 million healing strategy."

The healing fund is intended to help communities and individuals deal with the traumatic effects of the residential school system. It is not meant to be an alternative to legal action.

Aboriginal people across the country, who have been waiting for several months to hear how the fund will be used, got some answers on May 4.

On that day, it was announced that a federally-incorporated, non-profit foundation had been launched.

The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, with veteran Dene politician Georges Erasmus as its chairman, signed a funding agreement with the federal government and was incorporated on April 1. The foundation carries a nine-member interim board that will expand to 17 members over the next few months. The interim board will become permanent when the other eight members are added.

The manner in which the membership will expand was explained in an internal AFN memo obtained by Windspeaker.

"The permanent Aboriginal Healing Foundation will consist of 17 members. The original nine positions that have been identified as the interim board will make up the core of the new board. Each interim board member must go back to its nominating organization for confirmation to the permanent board within 90 days of the incorporation. If a member is not confirmed, the organization will replace the member with another name. This means the names for all nine positions must be confirmed by the end of June, 1998," stated the memo.

The members of the interim board are: Erasmus, Janet Brewster-Montague, Jerome Berthelette, Indian Affairs bureaucrat Wendy Grant-John, Gene Rheaume, Paul Chartrand, Maggie Hodgson, Debbie Reid and Teressa Nahanee.

As the board is now constructed, representatives of the federal government and the AFN - the two groups which worked together to hammer out the terms of the federal government's Statement of Reconciliation, which was annonced in conjunction with the healing fund, constitute a majority.

Indian Affairs and Health Canada each have one member. The AFN has three members. The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Metis National Council, the Native Women's Association of Canada and the Inuit Tapirisat each have one member. The chairman appears to be an AFN appointee, although repeated calls to the interim manager of the foundation, Health Canada employee Paul Kyba, for confirmation of this fact, met with no response.

An AFN appointee in charge of what is supposed to be a totally independent body raises a number of political concerns.

There has been debate across the country in the past several months about whether or not the national chief of the AFN has gotten too close to the Liberal government. Those watching the evolution of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation are wondering if the foundation will truly be "a separate, independent organization," as its chairman maintains. Others wonder about the government's motivation for creating the healing fund in the first place.

Persistent national mainstream news coverage of a similar story, the compensation of Hepatitis C victims, has exposed the inner workings of the Liberal cabinet to a great deal of scrutiny. Editorial comments (and remarks made by indignant victims) have labelled the federal government's attempts to limit Hepatitis C compensation as a heartless, immoral attempt to limit compensation versus morality and compassion.

The Reform Party didn't miss the chance to put the Liberal government in a tight spot on the issue. It made a motion about Hepatitis C compensation in the House of Commons that forced Prime Minister Jean Chretien to order his backbenchers to vote with the government or face party discipline.

"We are cynical enough now to believe there are forces at work and decisions taken by the government that go beyond moral principles and a sense of right and wrong, that are meant to limit legal liability," said Refom Party Indian Affairs critic, Mike Scott.

More recently, the Chretien government has ordered police investigations into bureaucratic leaks to the media. This has earned the prime minister the wrath of editorial writers for being too secretive and heavy-handed in his management of information.

Some Native leaders say it's interesting that the government and the mainstream press have devoted so much attention to Hepatitis C compensation and so little to reparations for the more intentional harm done by the residential school system.

Federal New Democratic Party Indian Affairs critic Gordon Earle said the key to fairness - even if the government decides it must limit the amount of money it pays out to victims of residential schools - must conduct its business in the open and include Aboriginal people in all parts of its decision-making process.

British Columbia's Sto:lo Nation Chief Stephen Point issued a press release in mid-May and said what many Aboriginal leaders are thinking. He suggested that the compensation bill in British Columbia, where almost half of the residential schools were located, could total $8 billion. Point estimates there are 15,000 victims in his province alone.