Residential school payouts linked to social problems
The National Post reports today that it has seen evidence that payouts to residential school survivors have contributed to social pathologies, including suicide, depression, and alcohol and drug abuse. The “Common Experience Payment” (CEP), which began in the fall of 2007, was intended to compensate aboriginals who were taken away from their communities to attend residential schools. Many students were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused.
In British Columbia alone, according to a member of one survivors’ group, two dozen deaths have been attributed to the payments.
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But notes from a January, 2008, meeting of a group set up by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs to troubleshoot issues that the payments would create highlighted the darker consequences.“Rebound expected once [money] runs out,” says notes attributed to Eric Duchesneau of the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Health and Social Services Commission. “Suicide a concern. One community has reported four suicides connected to CEP payments.”
The full story has many more specific examples of reported problems.
Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine supports the CEP programme, but admits that it has caused problems.
“I’d be completely unfair if I argued that there wasn’t one single suicide or violent death that was not a direct result of this,” he said.
Mr. Fontaine said the AFN had reports of deaths and suicides linked to the payment from the Yukon and it contacted Health Canada and Indian Affairs. Overall, he said, the authorities who “keep records of such matters [said] there was no spike that could be attributed to the CEP. I am talking about suicides and violent deaths.”
When the AFN first received those reports from Yukon First Nation leaders last May, Mr Fontaine brushed them off.
“It would be, in my view, wrong to suggest that the residential school settlement agreement [is] somehow directly responsible for the number of deaths in the Yukon,” he said in an earlier interview with the CBC.
Fontaine commented that he didn’t believe the deaths were directly linked to compensation payouts, but rather part of a larger tragedy of addiction and suicides among aboriginal Canadians.
He has since changed his tune. Rejecting Yukon’s concerns last spring, he implicitly admits, was “completely unfair”, although he tries to pass the buck to unnamed federal “authorities”.
Having spent a few years in Inuit communities this comes as no surprise. In the rush to hand out money both sides of the issue knew this was going to happen but wished it wouldn’t.
[...] “Payments to Indian residential school survivors meant to compensate them for mistreatment have led to suicides, substance abuse and depression across the country, documents obtained by Canwest News Service show”.. Good Intentions: [...]