Compensation Process Flawed: TRC Advisor
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 13:42
Saskatchewan’s advisor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission says he’s troubled that what he calls a “very flawed” compensation process is actually re-victimizing many former residential school students.
Eugene Arcand, a former residential school student from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, says nearly a quarter of all residential school survivors are from this province — yet there are only 30 health support workers to help them, a ratio of 600 to 1.
He says the support workers face “an impossible task”, especially when former students are confronted with the “graphic, ugly questions” asked in the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) form of people who suffered abuse at the schools.
“What’s happening is it’s triggering us. People are ‘falling off the wagon’, (and) people are doing more dangerous things than that. Lives are being torn apart, marriages are being torn apart, because all of a sudden you have to re-live, in a short period of time, what we’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget,” Arcand says.
He says the compensation process is a “lawyers’ agreement”, administrated by the very people who mandated the schools in the process — and as a result, the people it’s meant to help are being hurt once again.
He stresses that problems with the compensation process is clouding the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has nothing to do with either the IAP or the Common Experience Payment (CEP) process.
Arcand was speaking today at a reunion of Woodland Cree residential school survivors in La Ronge.