This article was originally published on the Fraser Institute website. It has been republished with the author’s permission.
The history of Ile-à-la-Crosse (IALC) in northern Saskatchewan goes back to 1776, when Thomas Frobisher established a fur trading post. Catholic Oblate missionaries arrived in 1846 and founded a small day school the next year, which was turned into a boarding school in 1860. Louis Riel’s sister Sara taught there until she died of TB in 1883. Under various names and at various locations, the school survived until the early 1970s.
The students were mainly Métis from northern Saskatchewan, with a sprinkling of Indian and white children. It was never an Indian Residential School (IRS) in the legal sense, though the federal government did at times make financial contributions proportional to the small number of status Indian children who attended. The school was mainly supported by the Oblate order and the Grey Nuns, with contributions from the province of Saskatchewan in later years.
Because the school was not an IRS, those who had attended were excluded from the IRS Settlement Agreement negotiated by Paul Martin’s government in 2005 and implemented by Stephen Harper’s government afterwards. Most students had been Métis, and the Settlement Agreement generally excluded Métis who had attended mission boarding schools that were not IRS. Wanting to share in the $5 billion financial compensation provided by the Agreement, the IALC students started legal action, using Tony Merchant’s law firm. Merchant, however, moved too slowly for the complainants, so the Sotos firm started another class action in 2022.
Following the “resistance is futile” policy enunciated by Jodi Wilson-Raybould when she was minister of justice, the federal government had already decided not to litigate, having signed in 2019 a memorandum of understanding to negotiate the claims. In March 2025, the federal government reached an agreement-in-principle with IALC students, which will go before a federal court judge for approval in January 2026. Saskatchewan announced its own agreement-in-principle in September, which will also go before the federal court.
Canada is putting up $27 million and Saskatchewan $40 million for individual compensation. With an estimated 600-700 “survivors,” this equates to individual payouts of about $100,000 apiece. This is admittedly guesswork, because neither agreement-in-principle has been published. News reports indicate that “families” will be involved in the compensation, so a larger number of claimants may materialize.
The federal news release says that compensation is being paid for “cultural loss abuse,” which includes loss of proficiency in the Cree and Michif languages spoken by the Métis in that area. Sexual and physical abuse are not mentioned, even though “survivors” claim to have been abused. Payments will be made to all who attended, as with the federal day school settlement and the “common experience” payment in the IRS settlement.
In the world of government, the joint payout of $67 million is a penny-ante affair, but the long-term implications are much greater. There are tens of thousands of Métis adults who attended mission boarding schools, both Protestant and Catholic, that were not considered IRS and were not admitted to the IRS Settlement Agreement. For them, the IALC settlement is like a dam breaking, setting a precedent for compensation. Class action law firms will commence new actions. Individual cases will be small, but there will be so many of them that the federal government will probably consolidate them into one multi-billion-dollar settlement, and the provinces will fall into line.
When Prime Minister Harper decided to implement the IRS settlement Agreement, he thought it would bring peace on the Indigenous front, allowing the government to move forward. It was an understandable hope, but in fact that decision unleashed a series of class actions that have cost taxpayers more than $50 billion and rising. When Harper was in power, he kept the lid on; but payments exploded after Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015 and made Wilson-Raybould minister of justice. Her instruction to Department of Justice lawyers to negotiate rather than litigate, which is still in force, caused resistance to Indigenous class actions to collapse and facilitated enormous payouts culminating in the $40 billion-plus child-care settlement. Now the Métis will get their piece of this ever-expanding payout pie.
