Ottawa is removing its recently imposed $500,000 cap for funding focused on locating or memorializing children who didn’t return home from residential schools.
The government reversed last month’s decision to limit federal funding for the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support program to $500,000 per community—a significant reduction from the previous annual cap of $3 million, says Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree.
“Our intention was to fund as many initiatives as possible but we recognize that the lack of flexibility of these changes was a mistake,” Anandasangaree said on Aug. 16. “Communities know best what is needed to undertake this important work, on their own terms. We committed to being there alongside communities every step of the way. That commitment remains and I apologize for any hurt or re-traumatization these changes may have caused.”
The move comes after meeting with indigenous leaders and communities who expressed opposition to the funding reduction, Anandasangaree said.
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) was among the groups that protested the funding cap. Deputy grand chief Betsy Kennedy
described Ottawa’s decision last month as “disheartening” and “disrespectful to the survivors and families affected by the residential school system.”
The AMC on Aug. 16 said the government’s reversal marked a “significant moment.”
“The government’s acknowledgment of the need for flexibility and responsiveness to the concerns of First Nation communities underscores the importance of dialogue and collaboration in addressing the painful legacy of residential schools,” the group said in an emailed statement.
Project Funding
Ottawa budgeted $238.8 million for the fund in 2022, several months after the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation’s May 2021 report that the remains of 215 children were found using ground-penetrating radar around a former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia’s Interior.Anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who was in charge of the radar scanning at the Kamloops site, later revised the number to 200, saying previous excavations in the area could have influenced the results.
Additional
searches using ground-penetrating radar uncovered more possible gravesites at former schools in the months following the discovery at Kamloops, but none of the sites have been excavated and no bodies have been found to date.
A yearlong
investigation by the RCMP into unmarked graves at the Minegoziibe Anishinabe First Nation in western Manitoba, which concluded last year, found no evidence pointing toward criminal activities, after ground-penetrating radar found 14 points of concern underneath the Catholic church. A four-week archeological excavation at the site the following month also uncovered no graves.
Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund spending totalled $216.5 million as of March 31, according to government
data. Funding through the program is set to continue until the end of 2026.
A 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
report estimated 4,117 children died at residential schools which were operated in Canada until 1996.
A July
report from the Senate indigenous peoples committee found the figures had not been verified and were later contradicted by some coroners’ reports. In Saskatchewan, for instance, the TRC provided a list of 620 potential deaths of children at residential schools. The Coroners Service searched its records for information and in 2015 identified approximately 400 children who died.
