A Quick Bit of Info
As part of the truth and reconciliation process the government has been running programs to basically pay people back for their experiences at residential schools. Some of this has been briefly mentioned but I thought I would write a little more about it.
Common Experience Payment: this is a flat payment for any student who attended and lived at an IRS (Indian Residential School) in Canada. You have to have lived at the school to qualify for this payment because it is meant to compensate for “loss of language and culture”. There are schools that aren’t on the list because the residences were billets in the commuity, like the one my dad attended. The payment is $10,000 for the first year and $3000 for every subsequent year one attended an IRS.
ADR/IAP: this is the program for abuses recieved at an IRS. This program is a lot more complicated; the CEP is a pretty basic 4-page form whereas the IAP (Independent Assessment Process) is a 40-page form. The government suggests-and pays for-laywer assistance for folks entering this program. My uncles have a 2-man law firm that is doing about 150 files of this kind. I worked as a form-filler for them, interviewing clients and bascially filling in the forms for them. The interview process is always emotional and sometimes very difficult. Some people do experience emotional trauma after talking about their experiences in these interviews. There is a counselling phone line set up specifically to help people through the IAP process. The whole thing takes about a year, on average, from the time that i interview the person to the time they get their money from the government. The payments are made on a point system and vary widely from several hundreds to several hundred thousands of dollars . The person gets points based on their abuse and the effects of that abuse over their lifetime.
I could go on and on about this stuff because I feel like I know quite a bit about it. The clients that I interviewed a year and a half ago are just now starting to get their money, and it’s pretty gratifying to have helped. The government pays the laywers an amount equal to 15% of the client’s settlement, the money doesn’t actually come from the client. So if a client is awarded $5000, they get $5000 and the lawyer will get a seperate payment of $750.
GREED: there are lawyers collecting clients for this program in order to exploit them. They send out these mass letters to whole reserves and have community meetings where they tell the people that they’re in for a lot of money. The lawyers get the folks to sign with them without making sure that they understand everything-it’s very unethical. The lawyers charge people percentages of their settlements regardless of the fact that they are getting paid by the government to do this. Some firms have several hundred claims/clients and have never met their clients face-to-face. Some people have come to my uncles’ firm to get away from lawyers like this, and I’ve heard some awful stories of people being bullied and ignored by their lawyers. This is a terrible practice, an abuse of the system, and a propogation of the elements of our cultural relationship that the T&R Comission is trying to get rid of!