Indian residential school cases near final settlement.

• Author: Fenwick, Fred R.
• Position: Aboriginal Law

Why Now?

In November of 2005, an Agreement in Principle was signed between the federal government and representatives of affected residential school survivors. The Agreement put into place a Settlement Proposal allowing each claimant $10,000 for their first year of residential school, $3,000 for subsequent years, and the right to claim further payments of between $5,000 and $275,000 if there was actual physical or sexual assault, together with additional specific program and education funding. This Agreement in Principle was followed by a Settlement Agreement in May of 2006, and courts across the country have one by one been approving the Agreement as a class action settlement for plaintiffs (and other new claimants) in their jurisdictions.

Throughout Canada, 10,538 residential school claimants and other claimants who come forward will be the direct beneficiaries of an estimated $1.9 billion.

Settlement funds available to injured people, and a truth and reconciliation process are all wonderful things. But why now? What special thing happened to bring this about? Was it that we hadn't known about these abuses for decades? Was it because of a sudden outpouring of goodwill on the part of the non-Aboriginal population?

Personally, I think it was about concrete.

Bear with me on this.

Many modern high-rise structures have their floor slabs built out of post-tensioned concrete. Like the concrete in your garage slab, which is reinforced by steel wire mesh, post-tensioned concrete floor slabs are reinforced by steel. In this case, they are also reinforced by cables that are threaded through the floors in metal tubes and then pulled tight (the tension) after the concrete has begun to cure, thus providing additional tension strength to the already high compressive strength of the concrete.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was found that, unless the cable channels were grouted (sealed) very thoroughly, water and, more critically, salt could get into the channels and corrode the steel cables, which could then snap (they were under terrific tension), come flying out of the floor, and endanger the structural integrity of the building. It's all fixed now, but there was a time in the early 1990s when we really wondered about the long-term viability of the most common method of building high-rises.

The response was two-fold. Firstly, the architects and engineers figured out appropriate retroactive fixes for the problem (we are reasonably safe in our...