What is the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement?

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) is the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, approved by the courts of nine provinces and three territories in 2007. The Agreement compensated former students of federally administered Indian residential schools, funded healing programmes, established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and created the Independent Assessment Process for serious abuse claims. The IRSSA represented the culmination of decades of survivor-led litigation and Indigenous advocacy.

The Agreement was negotiated between the Government of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Roman Catholic Church and other church entities (the Anglican Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the United Church of Canada) that had operated residential schools, and counsel for survivors. About 139 federally administered residential schools operated between the 1870s and the closure of the last school (Gordon Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan) in 1996. An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children attended.

The IRSSA had five main components. The Common Experience Payment compensated all surviving former students who had attended a recognised residential school for any period: about $10,000 for the first year of attendance plus $3,000 for each additional year. The Independent Assessment Process compensated for serious physical and sexual abuse, with awards from $5,000 to $275,000 (and supplemental awards in cases of consequential harm). The Aboriginal Healing Foundation provided healing-programme funding. Commemoration funding supported community memorials and cultural projects. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the system's history.

Implementation of the IRSSA generated significant additional litigation and policy work. The Independent Assessment Process closed to new applications on September 19, 2012 and to ongoing claims by 2021, with more than 38,000 claims processed and about $3.2 billion in compensation paid. The Settlement Agreement explicitly excluded several categories of survivors who later sought separate redress, including Newfoundland and Labrador residential school survivors (settled separately in 2017 for about $50 million) and federal day school survivors (settled by the McLean Day School Settlement in 2019 for about $1.4 billion). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action of 2015 and the federal Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announcement on May 27, 2021 of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School triggered renewed federal-provincial-Indigenous policy work that continues today.