Vancouver Province
for June 30, 2000

I must, at the outset, declare my interest in what is to follow. To paraphrase the great American humourist Will Rogers, I belong to no organized religion - I am an Anglican, baptized into the faith many long years ago at St Pauls in Vancouver’s West End. I have, therefore, a direct stake in the church’s fortunes.

Those fortunes are under serious threat. Archbishop Michael Peers, the Primate for Canada, sent a letter to all parishes, read last Sunday in churches’ across Canada, setting out the exposure arising out of the claims of hundreds of Natives sexually abused while in the care of Residential Schools run under the auspices of the Church.

I applaud the Archbishop’s stand though I think it ought to have been made sooner. The church, while admitting its fears has hitherto been less than frank as to what these consequences might be. What is astonishing – and very troubling – is that the major cost facing the Church is not the claims themselves but the legal costs. The two combined, will exceed the church’s $10 millions in assets.

But the most encouraging part of the Archbishop’s statement is the acknowledgement, in public and officially, of the church’s responsibility for these shameful misdeeds. While there’s no doubt that this confession has been implicitly made on other occasions this is the formal declaration I think all of our faith needed. Too many Anglicans have been in denial, assuming that these claims were all copycats, as if men in their 60s and 70s are likely to give evidence of abuse if it were not so. Late, perhaps, but full confession, (as it enjoins us to make with our individual misdeeds) has been made by the church.

Also encouraging is the Church’s effort to set up some sort of healing and compensation procedure which would encourage prompt settlement not just of fiscal damages but of the social and humanistic considerations. As Clarence Darrow, the famous American lawyer said when a client asked how she could thank him, "Madam, since the Phoenicians invented money there'’ only been on answer to that question." But money is not enough. Many of these victims and their families are fellow communicants and their faith is strong. That faith has been tested to the outer limits and we must help them restore it by talking it through. Many of the claimants are getting old, so time is of the essence. This, on all of our behalf, the Archbishop acknowledges.

Surely, though, the Canadian government must share in the blame. The residential school was a result of Ottawa policy that held that Indians were not humans but what the Indian Act, from time to time, said they were. It was Ottawa that declared and backed the policy that residential schools should only teach native kids trades since, to Ottawa, anything else would be pointless. Though Ottawa didn’t act as the school board for these schools they appointed and paid the commission that did.

There’s no doubt that the individual priests are to blame. But under our laws, so is the master for he declared and implemented the policy and should have supervised it. And while the Church was directly responsible for the priest, Ottawa was responsible for the policy and cannot shirk the responsibility for the consequences of that policy.

It isn’t just the Anglican Church that’s involved – so are the Roman Catholic and United Churches. These churches, taking the law of the land as laid down by Ottawa, educated natives in a way that in itself was abusive. The Native was treated as a non person – the law horribly degraded both the child and the parents. Moreover – and this is critical – the relationship the government established made it virtually impossible for the child to complain. How could they complain? And to whom? The priest who was abusing him? To his senior who, in a child’s eyes would just make it worse? To a parent from whom the child was forcibly taken? Wouldn’t any child fear that the limited connection he had to his parents would be severed if he told anyone at all?

I must and do take my share of blame as an Anglican – but we all, as Canadians, share the obligation to right a most terrible crime against individuals and a race, only part of which crime was the actual physical abuse.