Repentance and the residential schools: Canada's Anglicans stay the course

Catholic New Times, April 20, 2003 by Janet Somerville

The Way of the Cross--Philip Berrigan

   This much is clear:
   discipleship is the way of the cross.
   And the cross has a distinct meaning for us.
   It means punishment by the State for dissent,
   especially civil resistance,
   wherein man's unjust law is broken
   to keep God's law.

   It meant execution for Jesus,
   as it often does in the Third World.
   It often means torture and punishment there.
   In the United States, Canada,
   Western Europe, it means imprisonment.

   That is what modern Christian fear--the cross.
   It is also what the disciples feared:
   they knew what the Romans did to zealots and
   troublemakers.

   Their crosses and their victims dotted the landscape
   That is why I ask my fellow seekers,
   "Can you--can anyone serious about following
   Jesus today--remain safe and secure and legal?"

If you check the web site of the Anglican Church of Canada, you'll find a text called, Towards a new beginning. Here is part of it:

"Taking responsibility for the actions of the past is not an easy matter--yet we know it is consistent with our belief in the unity of the church. At this historic juncture, the whole church is challenged to confront injustice and contribute to healing. That is at the core of the Christian gospel. Dioceses that are strong and face no litigation are called on to support those that are weakened by litigation costs.... All Anglicans are being called to participate in efforts towards justice, healing and reconciliation."

As everyone, who is old enough to read a Canadian newspaper, knows, a tidal wave of legal actions has been thundering against the walls of the Anglican Church of Canada since the late 1990s. The federal government is under a similar siege, and so are other church-related bodies (the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, for example), whose history includes taking responsibility, under contract with Ottawa, for Indian Residential Schools. Something like 12,000 law suits (2,200 related to Anglican-run schools) are underway or hanging in the legal air. Many are individual claims based on charges of physical or sexual abuse. Many also seek compensation for enforced loss of language, traditions and culture, with resulting family, intergenerational, and community anguish and damage.

Four recently launched cases are huge class actions (not yet "certified", but looming nonetheless). One of these, reportedly, asks for $75 billion by way of compensation for damages attributed to the Indian Residential Schools. The stakes are high, even for the federal government. For the Anglican Church of Canada, bankruptcy of the national structure of the church and of eleven individual dioceses has been a grittily real possibility in every year since the late 1990s.

So it was huge news for Canadian Anglicans when on March 11, 2003, their Primate, Archbishop Michael Peers, co-signed with Hon. Ralph Goodale, Minister responsible for Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada, an agreement on how to free the Anglican Church from financially exhausting litigation, and how to share the costs of compensation to individuals for physical or sexual abuse in the schools.

The nerve centre of the agreement is a formula on how to share compensation costs. In every court case, that question of proportional responsibility (what share should be charged to government? What share to the church?) had been vexed, shifting, and expensively debated.

In 2001, government negotiators proposed a 70 per cent and 30 per cent formula, which would see the federal government assume the larger share, and the relevant church body the smaller one. However, even the 30 per cent solution could bankrupt the "Anglican entities," as the agreement refers to them. After a year of negotiating, the 70 per cent and 30 per cent split remained in place, but the government had agreed that it was in everyone's interest that the Anglican Church not be bankrupted. So a "cap" of $25 million was set for the church's share. That is, the church will pay 30 per cent of all compensation awards until it has contributed $25 million. After that point the federal government will pay 100 per cent of compensation awarded to claimants from Anglican schools.

There are intensely controversial limits to this agreement, which applies only to validated individual claims of physical or sexual abuse. The bigger questions, such as loss of language and culture, are explicitly excluded. Indeed, the agreement commits the church to "vigorously oppose" claims for compensation based" on loss of language and culture "and they (government and church) agree to cooperate in the defence of such claims."

The agreement provides for a non-adversarial ADR (alternative dispute resolution) approach that negotiators hope claimants will use instead of the regular courts, although the courts remain an option. The cash awards from an ADR process are intended to be equivalent to awards that could be expected from a court. Exactly how the ADRs will work--and who has the right to negotiate their design--is still being debated, after some hesitant pilot-projects about which no one seems happy.