• current column
• other past columns
• about James Ferrabee

In the 1920s and 1930s my grandmother, among hundreds of other women supporting the Anglican and other churches, traveled to far away posts, some above the Arctic Circle, to see what their hard work had wrought.

They swooped down on native communities, sometimes by train, sometimes by car and sometimes in canvas-sided planes. To them it was noble work, and the funds they collected, which would be worth millions in today's dollars, nearly all went toward this missionary work inside Canada. And much of it went to the native residential schools.

They thought supporting residential schools was filling an obvious need, and they set about helping with Christian zeal. But today their investment of time, money and faith in the residential schools is not a consideration in the equation. The fact is the residential schools have become a vexing and monstrously expensive issue for the churches and their followers, whether they are Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian or United Church. (The Anglican Church actually stopped participating in the system in 1969.)

There is no way the churches could have seen it coming. From the 19th century -- when the schools were founded under government ownership -- until the 1990s, there were no hints that students would sue for physical and sexual abuse by some teachers.

The law suits, in fact, didn't start until the mid-1990s, when abuse and harassment in the workplace and in schools sprang up as a social and political issue. One consequence of the public focus on abuse and harassment was the fact that, in some instances, the cases became money-spinners for opportunistic lawyers. It wasn't long before the litigation threatened to put the churches out of business.

There are about 12,000 residential school abuse claims. The Anglican Church was named in 2,200 of them, or around 18 percent. But the legal process is slow: only 560 have been settled and there have been 12 court judgments. The Anglican Church alone estimates its legal costs to be $100,000 a month. But only 2 percent of that money has gone to the victims.

Against this background, the Anglican Church decided to settle with the government, and will set up and operate a fund of $25 million over the next five years. This is the limit the people in the pews will have to pay. The federal government will pay the rest, and money will be returned if the settlements cost less.

For the Anglican Church, it was a matter of survival. Without a limit on the payments, many of the 30 dioceses would have gone bankrupt. The Presbyterian Church settled for the same reason. The Roman Catholic and the United churches have not settled yet.

Churches don't generate sympathy from governments. They do not have much political clout either. But they have become sitting targets for 30-, 40-, and 50-year-old claims of physical and sexual abuse. This raises many questions and places some responsibilities on governments.

Should not special courts, or arbitration panels, be established to avoid a delay of 10 years or more before the legal and financial issues are settled? One of the many important legal issues to be resolved, for example, is whether there should be a time limit beyond which claims cannot be made, for example, 30 or 40 years? If this and other legal issues were settled, it would save millions of dollars in legal fees to both the churches and the claimants.

Now the public service, public schools, publicly funded universities and private companies are trying to write codes of conduct in the devilishly difficult area of peoples' private behaviour. They are beginning to realize where the challenges lie.

First, over thousands of years of human existence no one has even succeeded in codifying human behaviour. The Bible and the Koran are just two attempts.

Second, they should be wary of writing a code of conduct when no two people behave the same way towards each other in any situation. The best that can be done is to draw up guidelines.

Third, the only way to meet the challenges is by educating students, teachers and workers.

The full scope of the tragedy of the residential schools is not likely to be known for a decade or more. That shouldn't stop governments from doing all they can to bring early and fair closure to the vexing question. By doing so, they would help relieve the legal, financial and spiritual anxieties that are haunting individuals on all sides.

James Ferrabee welcomes comment on this column at jferrabee@irpp.org