Red tape can't fix national wound (fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

Red tape can't fix national wound

JAMES TRAVERS
Nov. 6, 2003. 01:00 AM
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If time is the best healer, politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats are
surely the worst.

That will become sadly evident as the federal government unveils a
startlingly cold, badly flawed program to compensate only those former
students of aboriginal residential schools who are willing and able to
prove they were abused beyond the norms of the times.

 However well intended, the nearly $2 billion resolution process Public
Works Minister Ralph Goodale is expected to announce as soon as today
is too defensive, too legalistic and too bureaucratic to close a
national wound.

 Along with a previous apology, the expected 12,000 applicants who
manage to wade through a 55-page form and the pain of a hearing can
expect awards that, depending on the severity of beatings or the
frequency of sexual assaults, will range from a low of $5,000 to more
than $200,000. But in most cases those settlements will be reduced by
30 per cent because the Catholic Church is sidestepping responsibility,
claiming the Orders that operated the schools were independent and are
now extinct or penniless.

 Adding insult to injury, there will be no compensation for loss of
language and culture suffered by the surviving 90,000 aboriginal
children who, for almost 100 years, were torn from their families and
communities.

 Fearing added liability and more years of ugly wrangling, the federal
government is specifically avoiding more inclusive solutions that would
have put higher value on reconciliation and less on clearing the cases
from an already overloaded judicial system.

Nowhere is that approach more obvious, or more disturbing, than in the
decision to attach a point system and price tags to abuses that
shattered lives. Former students who prove they were raped, sodomized,
forced to perform oral sex or beaten more frequently and ferociously
than their peers will get bigger cheques.

 It's all contained in a brutally specific list of sexual and physical
abuses that should be required reading in a country that too often
assumes its moral superiority. The inescapable truth detailed in
careful, almost clinical language is that adults took shocking
advantage of children whom the state and four churches trusted them to
protect.

While today's announcement attempts to address that breach of trust as
well as that stain on the country's past, it falls far short. In too
closely following legal precedents, it puts too little weight on
national culpability and fails to recognize that a soul can be as
easily destroyed by one incident as by many.

That puts daunting pressure on adjudicators to add a human face to a
complex, high-risk process that aboriginals and others will be sorely
tempted to dismiss as mean-spirited.

Those 40 or so former judges and legal experts now confront the
formidable challenge of giving this system credibility by tilting it
away from the federal government and back toward the victims.

Even so, the risks are enormous.

There is real danger that fragile people will be damaged again and then
left to cope with fresh emotional scars as well as unaccustomed cash.

 That Ottawa is now weaving a supporting safety net is proof enough that
some former students may not be able to relive the past safely.

 A lesser danger is that aboriginal groups whose concerns are already
well documented will assess the system with a few test cases before
walking away.

If they are disappointed, or worse, the government will be left with a
costly white elephant in the form of the first totally new federal
department in decades, one that will consume about half the projected
budget, and courts swamped by thousands of emotional, complex and
costly cases.

What's most dispiriting is that there are alternatives to this
alternative. A government notoriously generous to its corporate friends
should have searched its conscience and found a more humane model for
its most vulnerable citizens.

Borrowing from South Africa, it could have opted for more truth,
reconciliation and healing. Instead, politicians are allowing
themselves to be led by lawyers and bureaucrats instead of their
hearts.

A process focused on attaching a specific cost to each time a child is
molested or assaulted misses important parts of the point.

It misses that rapidly aging victims need to put this behind them at
least as much as they need money.

It misses that what happened at residential schools dripped like acid
from generation to generation, destroying families and communities.

Most of all, it misses that a country that tried to assimilate a people
by attacking their language and culture, by forcing their children into
strange and distant schools, must now err on the side of those it hurt,
or hide its head in shame.

James Travers is a national affairs writer. His column appears Tuesday,
Thursday and Saturday. jtravers at thestar.ca.