Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.If you want to understand who has benefited most from Canada’s residential school reckoning, look not to the survivors, but to the lawyers and consultants in what critics call the 'Indian Industry.'From the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) to the present-day push for grave exhumations, federal indigenous policy has funnelled billions not just to victims, but to lawyers, academics, activists, and administrators whose fortunes depend on keeping the narrative of abuse and grievance alive — regardless of the evidence.The settlement agreement was a massive legal compact between the federal government and approximately 86,000 indigenous individuals who had attended residential schools between 1884 and 1997. It created a court-approved compensation scheme that included a Common Experience Payment for all students, a five-year endowment for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and an Independent Assessment Process (IAP) to adjudicate claims of abuse — claims that were not required to be substantiated with evidence.The final bill: $3.23 billion, more than triple the original estimate and still the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history..Critics have suggested the ballooning costs reflected Ottawa’s underestimation of abuse claims and survivors. But a more impartial reading would point to something else entirely: the powerful machinery of the Indian Industry. As the Toronto Star once described it, this is “an army of consultants, lawyers and accountants who are sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of First Nations and from federal government coffers.”Indeed, the settlement agreement proved a windfall for lawyers. Federal payouts to lawyers equalled 15 per cent of awards to claimants, and counsel were allowed to charge clients a further 15 per cent. On top of that, thousands of indigenous leaders, academics, and professional activists also profited from a growing bureaucracy of grievance, federal grants, and institutional appointments.Ottawa, for its part, has never balked at funding even the most problematic projects arising from this apparatus. Consider the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund, created in 2021 in response to a surge of allegations that thousands of children had been secretly buried in unmarked graves at former residential school sites..Those allegations were politically explosive, and the Trudeau government responded reflexively. In its 2022 budget, it allocated $238.8 million to “locate, document and memorialize” undocumented burial sites and to “honour families’ wishes to identify and repatriate children’s remains.”But there was — and remains — no physical evidence of previously unknown and highly questionable individual graves, let alone any mass graves containing murdered students. No bodies. No forensic discoveries. Just anecdote, speculation, and the political utility of a powerful narrative.Yet as Blacklock’s Reporter recently revealed, the fund is already $80 million over budget. Payouts to date total $246.7 million. Applications from Indian Bands for further exhumation-related funds now exceed $704 million — nearly triple the budgeted amount..One of the most visible examples of how this narrative is being sustained is a large orange billboard in the Kebaowek Indian Band in Quebec’s Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, 300 kilometres northwest of Ottawa. The billboard features the slogan “Every Child Matters” and lists a tally of 6,509 potential unmarked graves — widely shared on social media.But neither the Kebaowek figure nor any of the others floating online has been verified. Even CBC News has admitted it cannot confirm the accuracy of such numbers.Likewise, the often-cited figure of 150,000 residential school students is not the result of a systematic count. It originated in a 2008 speech by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, likely based on an old estimate from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. No independent audit was conducted. Nor is the widely repeated claim that 4,100 children died in residential schools supported by identifiable remains or documentation..The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), an offspring of the settlement agreement, claimed in 2015 that 3,201 indigenous children died between 1883 and 1996 while enrolled in residential schools. But it acknowledged that almost half of those deaths were due to tuberculosis — then the leading killer of children in both Europe and North America. Other causes included influenza, pneumonia, meningitis, and typhoid — epidemics that disproportionately affected indigenous communities due to lack of natural immunity and poor public health infrastructure."Of those 3,201 recorded deaths, just 423 named students — or 13 per cent — occurred on school property. The rest occurred in hospitals, sanatoria, homes, or elsewhere. And contrary to the implication of secret graves, there is no credible evidence that more than a handful of students who died on school property were buried anywhere other than their home reserve.”Even the TRC’s successor, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR,) acknowledges the death toll remains unverified. The Senate Indigenous Peoples Committee, in a 2024 report, noted coroners’ records suggest the 4,100 figure may be inflated due to duplication or misattribution. The committee recommended releasing all archived death certificates to clarify the matter — but this has yet to happen..What does all this mean?It means that more than $246 million has already been spent on a premise with little or no forensic support. It means taxpayer dollars are enriching lawyers, consultants, and organizations whose fortunes grow in proportion to national guilt. And it means that the government of Canada continues to fuel an industry that thrives not on reconciliation, but on permanent grievance.This is not justice. This is opportunism.And it is an appalling misuse of taxpayer money.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
