THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, March 10, 2026
The Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples met with videoconference this day at 10:02 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on the government response, dated April 26, 2024, to the committee’s fourteenth report (interim), entitled Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation, tabled in the Senate on July 19, 2023, during the First Session of the Forty-fourth Parliament.
Senator Margo Greenwood (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: Honourable senators, before we begin, I would like to ask all senators and other in-person participants to consult the cards on the table for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents. Please make sure your earpiece is away from all microphones at all times. When you’re not using your earpiece, place it face down on the sticker placed on the table for this purpose.
I would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation and is now home to many other First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples from across Turtle Island.
My name is Margo Greenwood from the province of British Columbia, and I am the Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples. In the absence of the chair today, it’s my honour and privilege to chair this important meeting.
I wish to invite committee members participating in today’s meeting to introduce themselves.
Senator Clement: My name is Bernadette Clement. I’m a senator for Ontario. More specifically, my home community is Cornwall, Ontario, located on the traditional territory of the Mohawk people of Akwesasne.
Senator Tannas: Scott Tannas from Alberta.
Senator Francis: Brian Francis from Epekwitk, Prince Edward Island.
Senator Sorensen: Karen Sorensen, Alberta, Banff National Park, Treaty 7 territory.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, colleagues. I wish to welcome all of you as well as people across Canada who may be watching via Senate ParlVU.
We are meeting under our order of reference on the government response, dated April 26, 2024, to the committee’s fourteenth report (interim), entitled Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation, tabled in the Senate on July 19, 2023, during the First Session of the Forty-fourth Parliament.
Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming, via video conference, from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Raymond Frogner, Head of Research, Archives and Collections; and, at the table, from the National Council for Reconciliation, Michael DeGagné, Co‑Chair.
Thank you both for being here today. Before we hear your opening statements and proceed to questions and answers, I would ask everyone present to please mute notifications on their devices.
We are now ready to hear your opening remarks, which will be followed by questions from senators.
[Translation]
Raymond Frogner, Head of Research, Archives, and Collections, National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: [Indigenous language spoken]
Good morning. My name is Raymond, and I’m the head of research and archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
[English]
I am speaking to you today from the University of Manitoba campus, located on the original lands of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anisininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Dene and Inuit and on the national homeland of the Red River Métis.
Thank you for this opportunity. Stephanie Scott, Executive Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, or NCTR, sends her apologies and regrets that she could not be here, as she is currently out of the country.
In your July 2023 interim report, this committee said that the work of identifying and locating the missing children of residential schools was “important,” “urgent” and “sacred.” And you said that it required federal funding that is “. . . adequate, predictable, stable and long-term . . . .” The response that you received from the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations was disappointing. The minister described what the government was funding as of April 2024 but failed to provide any commitment to sustain this funding.
Two years later, Survivors, families, Indigenous communities and the organizations that support them are still in the dark. We simply don’t know what is going to happen to this important, urgent and sacred work when the current funding runs out. In this regard, I want to underline something that you have heard many times before and which you reflected in your interim report. Research on finding our missing children is complex and highly sensitive work. Doing it right means doing it carefully. Short-term funding is completely the wrong approach. It raises hopes. It opens old wounds. But it doesn’t offer the reasonable prospect of actually finding and honouring the children who were lost. Rushing this work harms Survivors, families and their communities.
I’d like to share just a few brief examples.
There has been no further work by the Residential School Documents Advisory Committee, or DAC. Its work was suspended in October 2024 after key leaders and experts involved with the committee lost trust in the process because the federal government would not provide the resources needed to fulfill its mandate. An estimated 20 million previously unreleased federal government records have yet to be transferred to the NCTR. We have a cost breakdown of the budget required to ingest, preserve and make available these additional records that the DAC project has identified.
Since this committee’s report, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada has chosen not to renew funding for the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. There is currently no clarity on overall funding for work to find missing children and unmarked burials past the 2026-27 fiscal year. We don’t even know the process or timeline for the government to make its decision.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation continues its work to identify and verify the names of children who died in the residential school system. However, we work within the constraint that our own sustainable core funding has not been confirmed beyond March 2027.
I also want to emphasize that federal support for the NCTR has been limited to work directly related to the Indian residential school system. We know, however, that when the children were taken away, they often passed through many institutions, including Indian hospitals, tuberculosis clinics, day schools and boarding schools and even orphanages. One thing we know with certainty is that we cannot trace the lives of these children by looking only at the residential school system.
Finally, on a slightly different theme, I want to draw attention to the impending September 2027 deadline for the destruction of Independent Assessment Process records, known as IAP records. The NCTR has been working hard to get the word out that Survivors have options to preserve their IAP records, including by entrusting them to the NCTR, but they need to come forward, and they continue to do so, albeit slowly.
Given the importance and urgency of protecting as many of these records as possible, we strongly believe that the federal government can and should be doing more to help inform Survivors, families and communities about their options.
It is a tragedy that we are losing records that identify some of the worst human rights violations of children in the history of this country.
We must be mindful the federal government is not the only holder of records concerning residential schools. Church records are an ongoing challenge. We have encountered many situations where local offices of the Catholic Church have not opened their sacramental files to Indigenous researchers. Often, these files are the only form of vital statistics available to investigate the death of a child or an unmarked burial site.
For example, the Province of Alberta was created in 1905; the Dunbow Industrial School began in 1884.
We continue with our project to identify oblates who worked in the Indian residential school system as part of our effort to depict the total Indian residential school history. We have signed an agreement with the Oblates of OMI Lacombe to do this work.
We have identified and confirmed 406 oblates so far who were involved in the residential school system. Looking forward, I would say that the final list could be in the hundreds, if not thousands. This is a vitally important demonstration of the role of Quebec society in the residential schools of the West and the North. We are hopeful of doing similar projects with nuns’ orders, thereby depicting a greater understanding of the residential school experience.
The NCTR will soon complete its Canada Foundation for Innovation, or CFI, grant to construct the digital infrastructure to preserve digital records. The NCTR can now say with confidence that it has a reliable system built on international standards to preserve millions of digital records that document the history and legacy of the residential school system.
The next step is to develop a purpose-built research repository with the ability to investigate the records in a detailed and intuitive manner, informed by Indigenous knowledge methods. Such a repository will supply meaningful access to the records held at the NCTR archives. It would be a trauma-informed, interactive online space where researchers can share, negotiate, heal and grow from the knowledge of the Indian residential school history and legacy. Any support for developing this research repository would greatly assist communities in their research into unmarked burial sites and missing children.
To this end, I’d like to recommend the government share the public spatial data it has gathered to create a map of unmarked burial sites near residential schools. This baseline data set would help form a foundation for the NCTR’s detailed burial site map that it would share with Indigenous communities and, where possible, the general public. It will be up shortly.
The NCTR remains committed to this valuable work, and we will continue to hold Survivors at the heart of our mandate, whether it is research, public education or understanding the historical record of Indian residential schools.
Working in partnership and unity with Survivors, their families and all Canadians, we continue to create a public good.
Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Mr. Frogner.
Mr. DeGagné, you have the floor.
Michael DeGagné, Co-Chair, National Council for Reconciliation: Thank you very much, and good morning. Nice to see you. Thank you, senators, for this kind invitation. Thanks to former colleagues whom I see sitting around this table. Thank you for the land acknowledgement of the Algonquin people.
My name is Mike DeGagné. In my role this morning, I am the Co-Chair of the National Council for Reconciliation. The National Council for Reconciliation was established as Call to Action 53 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
There are three principal tasks that the National Council for Reconciliation carries out. The first one is to monitor, evaluate and report annually to Parliament on the Government of Canada’s post-apology progress on reconciliation. This is a monitor to ascertain — as much as we can — how the Government of Canada is fulfilling its promises to the process of reconciliation.
The second one is the same but broader, which is to monitor the progress of reconciliation across Canada. I think we’re all familiar with the work that many corporations have done, for example, on reconciliation action plans. There are a number of municipalities across Canada that are adopting reconciliation policies and concrete work plans to ensure that the relationship is maintained with Indigenous People in their areas.
Of course, we have churches and other faith groups that are actively encouraging their congregants to follow church plans for the implementation of reconciliation. Reconciliation is not something that is limited to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It’s not limited to what the government can do. It is an invitation to all Canadians to engage in a relationship with Indigenous People.
Finally, the National Council for Reconciliation will develop a national action plan for reconciliation. Without the presence of institutions and national plans, many of these social movements fall by the wayside. This morning, you see the importance of the NCTR, for example, in supporting the work that is highly valued by Indian residential school Survivors, so institutions are critically important.
One of the things we’ve accomplished so far as the National Council for Reconciliation is we have an information disclosure protocol with government. That was one of the first things we negotiated. If we are to go to government annually and ask them for documentation on how they are carrying out reconciliation, we need to have some sort of an understanding of what will be shared in a timely fashion that allows us to report to all Canadians on the work that’s happening.
There are three points I’ll leave you with in support of the Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation report. The first one is that records are critically important. That sounds obvious to a group like this.
I am also involved in the Hardy settlement, which is the Indian hospitals file. What we’re doing is going across Canada to engage with former patients of Indian hospitals and asking them, “What’s important to you, and what can we as a group carry out on your behalf?”
I am, frankly, shocked at how often records are brought up: “I want records. I want access to my records. I want access to my family’s records. I want them in a timely fashion.” It comes up all the time.
Regarding the NCTR’s work with respect to records and providing them to, in this case, residential school Survivors as well as Indian hospital Survivors, et cetera, all of that is incredibly important work and surprisingly top of mind for residential school Survivors and others.
I think the second thing is the importance of commemoration. If I had to reflect on the work of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which was settled almost 20 years ago, the one element of that settlement that was least emphasized was commemoration. It felt like an afterthought.
I’m here to say that commemoration is a critical piece. It’s a sacred trust for all of us. We have to make sure that burial sites are commemorated because this will ensure that the public understands what happened here. Commemoration is critical to public understanding. It’s not something that is left to the end, but rather I think it forms the centrepiece of the work we need to do.
Finally, truth is incredibly important to us. It’s not enough during this time of residential school denialism that we simply go after the deniers and try to silence them. What’s most important for us is to form a sound basis of truth and respond in kind every time we hear denialist rhetoric to ensure that the truth is out there and that the Canadian public understands it.
What is critical to this truth is the building of institutions. As I look at my colleague from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation from decades ago, I think back to how important the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was in ensuring that residential schools and the understanding of residential schools never went away.
We need more Indigenous institutions. We acknowledge that there is very little in the way of civil society organizations that support Indigenous causes. We need these institutions to ensure that the truth is out there, records are accessible and commemoration is at the heart of everything we do.
Thanks very much.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Mr. DeGagné.
Thank you to both of our witnesses. I will now invite senators to ask their questions. I wish to remind senators that you will each have a maximum of five minutes. This includes your questions and the answers from our witnesses.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you both for your testimony. The content of your comments is disappointing. Your comments weren’t disappointing, but the content of the comments was disappointing.
My questions have been somewhat responded to in your testimony, but I’ll ask, and it may allow for some elaboration.
Meaningful progress requires active searches, not just passive disclosure. It’s my understanding that some federal records are likely misclassified or poorly described and spread out across multiple departments, and those different departments may also apply different rules, privacy interpretations or internal processes, which will, of course, slow disclosure.
From your perspective — and I’ll ask the question to both of you — do you believe the federal government currently has a clear understanding of the scope and location of all residential school-related records that they hold and a plan to directly and collaboratively address the issues with disclosure?
Mr. DeGagné: In 1998, when we began work on the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which was intended for residential school Survivors, I quite naively picked up the phone one afternoon and called Library and Archives Canada. I said, “We would like to have all the records relevant to residential schools,” and I was transferred several times, but then I got to a person who was quite knowledgeable about what the holdings were. He said, “You want all the records relevant to Indian residential schools?” They hadn’t been digitized at the time. This was 1998. And he said, “Picture a football field covered with bankers boxes, and picture it maybe two or three deep. That’s the amount of information we have on Indian residential schools.”
I think, in many ways, what we’re looking at here is a monumental task — the amount of information is absolutely vast. We need to work with the federal government to ensure that as much of that can be transferred in a responsible way, subject to privacy, et cetera, but also that we are prepared to receive it.
It’s one thing to just simply say, “You know what? I’ll send a few trucks over, and I’ll pick up all those bankers boxes.” It’s quite another to have a firm plan in mind on how the information can be received, how much of it we can deal with in any period of time and then how we can use it to the best advantage of residential school Survivors.
For me, it’s always been a sense of scope: How much work is there here? Is the federal government doing what it can to expedite the transfer of those documents? Yes, but it has to be done responsibly with respect to what we can do with them if we got that tidal wave of documentation.
Senator Sorensen: It really is a comment on the receiving end, yes.
Mr. Frogner, do you have a comment?
Mr. Frogner: First, I would like to say I’m very happy to hear Mr. DeGagné’s comments. I completely agree with him.
One of the first things to keep in mind is that in spite of the fact that this was one of the longest-running and most comprehensive social programs in the history of the government, there never was a comprehensive record-keeping system. We’re trying to trace the destiny of children lost when their deaths were never recorded in the first place. There are many questions that remain unanswered which, at the end of the day, we may never find the answers to.
While working with the Residential School Documents Advisory Committee, or DAC, we spent close to two years with an Indigenous advisory group that gave us a list of subject headings that came to approximately 10 pages, which we gave to Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, or CIRNAC, and they distributed this subject list to the 15 departments across the federal government, and that’s what they used to try to identify records that were relevant to the residential school experience.
It’s not just the daily operations of the schools but also, as we mentioned before, the records of Indian hospitals, tuberculosis clinics, day schools and orphanages. These are the sorts of things that are also relevant to the experience of the residential school system.
CIRNAC and the departments did a good job of following that subject list — not entirely, but it got very close to trying to identify, in each department, the records that were relevant to this experience. However, as Mr. DeGagné mentioned, there is a tremendous cost to ingesting, processing, making master copies and also making access copies that researchers can investigate and use in their research. None of that was accounted for, and that’s what I was mentioning in my opening remarks. It’s one thing to identify records that are relevant to the residential school experience. It’s quite another to process them and make them available for researchers and ensure that they are preserved for future generations. That’s where another big question remains unanswered.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you. I’m going back to Mr. DeGagné to follow up on these comments. I think we were all interested — well, we did a study on the documentation that’s held by other institutions, and it’s been commented on a few times in here.
Can you just comment: How much responsibility does the government have to reach out to these other institutions? We had empathy for those institutions because of resources, both human and financial, but I’m so intrigued by all these records that aren’t accessible, particularly through the churches. That was hard testimony to hear.
Mr. DeGagné: Oh, yes. The government has responsibility for the documentation that it collected, but it would be very difficult for them to talk the churches into sharing the oblate files, et cetera.
Senator Sorensen: We tried.
Mr. DeGagné: Having worked with the oblates many years ago to try to do the same thing through one of the universities, this is a real challenge.
What was helpful for us was the development of that information disclosure protocol. A lot of the time, we asked department by department, and they don’t make it up on the fly, but they all have different policies and procedures in order to release documents or to honour commitments they have for disclosure.
It was very helpful for us, and it took a lot more time than we thought to get an information disclosure protocol in place so that there isn’t any guesswork. If we ask for this, you will provide this. You will collaborate with other departments in order to provide files where you are natural collaborators and this sort of thing.
The work on a protocol for this, even a protocol with the churches, might be the place to push hardest.
Senator Sorensen: Do you think there’s a second football field out there?
Mr. DeGagné: I think there is.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you.
Senator Tannas: Thank you both for being here today and for the work that you have done over the course of your careers and continue to do.
I have a couple of questions that folks who are watching me may be wondering about.
Number one is for Mr. Frogner. You talked about funding for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, or NCTR, being uncertain beyond 2027. I’m just wondering about two things. First, what does that do for you now in terms of trying to plan for the potential that there may be a significant step back or a winding down of the activities?
Second, how much work are you doing with respect to artificial intelligence to set the stage for future work being done in a different fashion than would have been imagined a decade ago when institutions like yours were set up?
Would you like to have a go at it, please?
Mr. Frogner: Sure. Thank you, Senator Tannas. Those are both very relevant and important questions.
Regarding the first question, I think the search for the destiny of lost children is a core and fundamental responsibility of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, or NCTR. It’s part of what the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, or IRSSA, was meant to be assigned to us in the first place.
These activities — this research and investigation — should be core funding. At the moment, it’s an 18-month window that we continually renew. To do that, we have to hire and rehire researchers to agree to an 18-month contract — sometimes from a distance or by relocating to Winnipeg — and then we know that within 18 months, we can’t guarantee that their position will be renewed.
Not too long ago, we had a staff of five doing this intense research school by school. There are 144 schools. In each school, we’re trying to make a list of children who were lost and a comprehensive list of who was sent to those schools. I think we have around 25 now that are thoroughly documented, but this is a very long and intensive road that we’re going to try to go down. We’re now down to two because we couldn’t renew three of those contracts.
As I said, this has to be core funding. The quality of the work suffers, as does the effectiveness and the respect for Indigenous communities. To do this in a temporary manner, it creates hope and it opens old wounds, but then nothing is resolved, and that causes more frustration. It needs to be core funding. There’s simply no other way to understand it and address it properly with dignity and respect.
As for artificial intelligence, or AI, a couple of weeks ago, I submitted my new Canada Foundation for Innovation, or CFI, proposal for a research repository. One of the things we’re proposing is to use AI to transcribe the — literally — millions of records that we hold in handwritten form.
We’re constantly working with communities who complain that not only is it handwritten, but it’s also in old school missionary French from the 19th century that sometimes even uses Latin. We’re proposing to apply AI, and the standard of AI accuracy is approximately 98% for transcription of handwriting right now. In the near future, we may potentially be able to provide full-text search for handwritten materials in an easily written typescript. That’s part of our proposal for this new repository, which I had mentioned in my opening remarks.
Senator Tannas: Thank you. That’s remarkable.
Mr. DeGagné, you mentioned commemoration and, in addition, burial sites. You also talked about deniers.
I want to put on the table and have you respond to the fact that — at least in the public realm — the average citizen would say that there has been no proof beyond the LiDAR of burial sites, unmarked graves and so on.
At some point, how do we address deniers when we don’t have any kind of solid proof? How do we get past this standoff between LiDAR and disturbances in the soil and deniers without actually having truth or proof? How do you see this ending?
Here we are, some 80-odd years after the Second World War, and we still have people who deny the Holocaust, and there couldn’t have been more records around that.
Where are we going with this, and how do we deal with this one particular example that is in the way of both commemoration and reconciliation?
Mr. DeGagné: That’s an interesting question. What I think we need to acknowledge, first off, is that there will always be deniers. There will be deniers, because it doesn’t fit their particular narrative of maybe who they are or what Canada is or what their community is like. That’s a given.
Having come through the university system as an administrator, my sense is the answer is not to simply shout down people or not give them the same access that everyone else has to the public square to state their opinions, but I think we need to make sure that the truth is told, supported by institutions, which provide a countervailing argument.
In other words, let’s not cut people off from saying the things that we don’t want to hear through denialism. Let people say what they need, and then let’s provide what we have in evidence.
I think it’s also important to say that just because one piece of evidence is missing or is not as strong as we would like, then that allows people to build a house of opinion based on faulty evidence, such as: “We didn’t find a child in this particular site that we deemed a gravesite; therefore, residential schools were probably all a lie, and it was probably beneficial to Indigenous children, and the many hundreds of thousands of people who went through residential schools are making this up.”
I think we have to make sure that if we are all going to speak or share our opinions, then they must be rooted in as much evidence as we can find and we must give everybody the opportunity to say their piece. But for those of us who know the story of Indian residential schools and have sat with Survivors for decades and have read thousands of pages of transcripts, they’re not all lying. I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that this truth is told and that it’s told vigorously and with respect to the stories of residential school Survivors, as they’ve shared them.
There are thousands of stories out there captured on video, which I know my colleague, who is sitting here at the table, did for years. They are captured on video and by audio. There are transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and many other processes that are part of the exposure of what happened at residential schools.
We just need to keep telling that truth, and there’s no value in shouting down the deniers. Let them speak. They will always be there.
Senator Tannas: Thank you.
Senator Francis: My question is for Mr. Frogner.
A few weeks ago, Indigenous Services Canada confirmed that the Residential School Documents Advisory Committee never resumed its work after its chair, Cadmus Delorme, and other members resigned in July 2024 because of funding disputes. However, officials added that the work completed by the advisory committee, particularly for its development of a broader definition of relevant records, continues to guide departmental efforts to identify and disclose additional documents.
I’d like you to speak to how the discontinuation of the advisory committee has impacted the work currently being undertaken to transfer records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and, specifically, what progress has been made since the committee’s work was paused? Are there mechanisms now in place to provide independent oversight of the federal search for residential school records?
Mr. Frogner: Thank you, senator. This is what I was commenting on previously and also in my presentation.
While working with the Residential School Documents Advisory Committee, which I was also on, there was an Indigenous advisory group who, as I said, created a subject list of approximately 10 pages identifying issues relevant to the residential school experience from the perspective of Survivors. That was the subject list that was used and distributed across departments to track down records that were relevant to document the residential school experience going forward. That work was more or less done. It was ongoing, but there was significant progress being made.
With that subject list in mind, there was some pushback from some departments regarding some of the terms and terminology, but we were very insistent that this was a Survivor-driven research project.
The problem was that we did supply a budget regarding the cost of digitization, ingestion and processing those records that would then be made into master copies for preservation and also access copies. The funding window was explained, and the budget was there, but the resources were never provided for us to do that.
Records were identified, and for the most part, it was to a certain satisfactory degree. The identification of the records is the first step in bringing them to the centre, saving them and making them accessible to researchers, which is what needs to be done next. That budget is what we provided for, and that’s what needs to be recognized.
I should add, too: We also now have a very successful preservation system that was funded by a $6.2-million CFI project. We spent several years developing this process to ingest and preserve digital records in our digital environment.
If we did get these records, we could guarantee their long-term preservation for future generations. As I’ve also mentioned, we’re now developing a public-facing research database that would allow for more sensitive access to the records, better investigative capabilities of the records and improved research. All of that would depend on providing the resources that we could then use to ingest, store and make available these records.
Senator Francis: Thank you. Mr. Frogner, would you suggest that we also hear from Cadmus Delorme, the former chair?
Mr. Frogner: Certainly. He was the chair of the committee, and I think his input would be valuable, yes.
Senator Francis: Thank you. Mr. DeGagné, do you have anything to add?
Mr. DeGagné: No. I would only say that these are discussions about resources, and it’s absolutely critical for people in positions like Cadmus Delorme to make sure that they vote with their feet to make the strongest possible case for continued resourcing of something as critical as this.
As all of us know here, there are many competing interests in government, even one as large as us, but I think it’s critical to have Cadmus Delorme say a few words here. He and his colleagues did the responsible thing to push their agenda as far as they could, and their perspective needs to be heard. I think that’s a great suggestion.
Senator Francis: Thank you.
Senator Clement: Thank you for your testimony. There’s so much.
Mr. Frogner, your comments about funding and short-term funding and the damage that causes really resonate.
Mr. DeGagné, regarding your response to Senator Tannas in terms of deniers and not shouting them down, finding a way to let all of those things exist but also keep filling the space with truth, it’s powerful testimony. Thank you.
There’s a petition that has been signed by more than 13,000 people originating from Ontario. It closed last week, and it has called on parliamentarians to protect and preserve the confidential records from the Independent Assessment Process, which are set to be permanently destroyed by September 2027.
These records were gathered with the promise of confidentiality and represent the most detailed records ever collected. What do you need from Parliament to ensure Survivors have access to those records? I know you’re talking about awareness, but the truth is there are limitations to awareness. People will get missed. How do we ensure Survivors’ privacy is respected but also ensure the records are not destroyed without consent? Do you need legislation for this? That’s my first question.
Then my second question is around resources. A lot of the communities are doing the work here. They’re going to court because we know the governments need to be taken to court. Churches need to be taken to court before people do anything, but the communities are doing this work.
If you can address the healing piece that needs to take place around mental health, how do we support communities in going through that process? Those are my questions to both of you.
Mr. DeGagné: If I could answer first about the protection of the documents, anyone who has sat through a video recording of a story and an IAP hearing and has heard the pain involved in those stories will know that many people would never have told that story if they thought for a moment that those things would be public. Just from a research point of view, it’s tempting to think that there’s value and there’s a richness in those things that can’t be lost, but they never would have shared what they shared without it.
If anything, for those of us who gathered that research, I think we must look to ourselves to say, “You know what? We didn’t do the work we should have done in terms of disclosures and disclosure statements by saying we promise to keep this private; however, 20 years from now, do you agree that we can release it with the agreement of your family?” We could have done a much better job on those releases. Now we find ourselves in the position where we’re going to lose all of this testimony that we never would have had anyway had we not given ironclad guarantees that they wouldn’t be public.
My view would be that we have to honour our commitment to privacy for those people. There’s lots of other information out there. There are lots of other proofs and truths and testimony out there that we can access from all sorts of other processes, but for this, you only need to sit through a couple of them to understand the bargain that was made to tell something so painful that it could change your life.
I have a really strong opinion about whether or not these things are — sure, it would be great to preserve them, but who’s going to read them? Are they the only sources of this kind of information? I don’t think they are.
What can communities do to support this kind of healing work? My colleague from the NCTR talks about the importance of research here, not just getting the documents but also using them in terms of research. I think there’s a lot more research that can be done. We are in the collection phase of this process. Even though this has been a 100-year process in residential schools, we’re still collecting. I think at some point, we have to take a step back and begin the process of analysis of what it is we have, like my colleague at the NCTR is doing with his team.
When we worked on the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and then closed it in 2012, we had 1,500 community healing projects that we had funded with probably $400 million. We had thousands and thousands of records that those funded projects have kept to tell us about how well the healing was going, such as: “We invested in this kind of process, and healing emerged, and it was good for our people. Or we invested in this kind of process, and nothing happened or it didn’t succeed.” All of that is there in a roomful like this of documents, reports, outcomes and recommendations.
We gave those at that time in 2012 to Algoma University for their library, where they’re kept safe. I would be hard pressed to think of anybody who has decided to go into those archives and do a PhD dissertation on those healing outcomes. I don’t think there was anybody. There might be a few, but none that I know of. Those are the kinds of records that we should be constantly mining to give us some truths about what healing looks like and what’s possible, but we haven’t gotten to that phase yet. We’re mainly in the phase of gathering and acquiring. I think we need to enter into the analysis phase so that we can help communities heal.
Senator Clement: Thank you. Do you have any comments, Mr. Frogner?
Mr. Frogner: Yes. First, I’d like to maybe begin by saying that there is a common misconception about the role of archives. This began with the original judge’s decision in the Ontario Superior Court regarding whether or not these records should be preserved. There’s the perception that if they do come to the archives, then they are publicly accessible, but that’s completely false. It’s a mischaracterization of the rule of archives. There have been centuries of examples of archival institutions holding down records and locking them down, including financial, health and legal, and for several generations they are not made accessible. We can do that with these. The point is that we can’t afford to lose this knowledge if we want to learn the identity of this country. Who we are is based fundamentally on these kinds of milestone events that occurred in our history, and we can’t just callously or flippantly toss them aside because of some unfulfilled tort law which says now that the decision is made, the records must be destroyed. No, we learn from them after the decisions have been made, and going forward, we can learn from them.
I would observe the fact that there was not a Canadian archivist given as a witness in the original Superior Court decision on whether these should be preserved. I would say to you that if there had been, the archivist would explain these records could very easily be locked down and not made accessible. I understand the profound depth of harm that can be done. On a daily basis, I work with Survivors who tell me they don’t even want their own personal family members to see their records. I understand that. That is why these records would not be made available, but they would be saved for future generations, and we would still learn from these records in the future. They have a profound value, and I think destroying them, quite frankly, is obscene for the identity and the understanding of this country. Let’s be clear: After our research, we have now confirmed that there are approximately 170,000 to 175,000 children who went through the system, and 35,000 sat for the IAP process. That’s a highly significant number, especially if we want to talk to a class of deniers who say these schools weren’t so bad. That’s a very significant portion of children who went through the IAP process.
We can’t afford to just toss those. At the same time that we’re worried about deniers, we’re tossing away the most valued set of records that actually respond to those deniers’ claims? I think losing these records would be a historic loss of international proportions. In the history of colonial jurisdictions around the world, I can’t imagine another record set that so profoundly documents the experience of a group of peoples as they were being colonized, as these records do. This is why I would ask: What is the federal government doing to reach out to Survivors’ communities to let them know that they have basically a little over a year left now to try to save their testimonies? We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. We’ve sent out over 600 lists of letters to band councils across the country. We have media that we go to in order to promote this. We’re looking at community radio and social media. We’re doing what we can do to try to make this known, but the reserves of the federal government would be a tremendous asset on this account.
Senator Clement: How about legislation?
Mr. Frogner: I was just going to address that.
Senator Clement: Okay. Go ahead, sorry.
Mr. Frogner: I don’t know so much if legislation is required. As I said, the archival role would protect those records in the first place. Maybe if the legislation said that there shall be resources to be made available so that these records are stored and available for future generations to learn from, I think that would be useful. They would be locked down if they were to be given to the NCTR. It’s the final decision of the Survivor. It’s a very short form, but on that form, it’s the Survivor who has the final decision on what shall be made available in their testimony. We’re just safekeeping the records and making sure they don’t get lost and facilitating public availability.
Regarding the resources to have them saved and learned from in future generations, I think that would be a very useful piece of legislation.
Regarding communities and commemoration, I think one of the things that I find difficult from our work is that CIRNAC is funding this research community by community. There is an economy of scale that can be gained if somehow the research could be funded in some kind of collectivity by language, by regional group or by cultural group. Communities come to me about the same school and say, “Our children from our community were sent to this school. We want the records of the school,” to which I say, “This school had over 30 communities’ children. We can’t send all 30 communities the same records.”
Rather than fund each individual community, I think it would be more effective if CIRNAC started to look at ways to do this collectively. As well as doing that, maybe start to build some open-source digital tools that these communities can apply and use so that they’re not always saddled with the costs of licensing, systems administration and all these kinds of upgrade costs that small communities often don’t have the resources to take care of.
Community by community is not an effective way to do this investigation.
Senator Clement: Thank you both so much. Nia:wen.
Senator Sorensen: I just want to say, first of all, that I have so much respect and appreciation for the work that you and others have done for decades. I have said many times that this committee is education for me. It also leaves me feeling very helpless after these meetings.
Mr. Frogner, you answered my question already, so I’m going to turn to Mr. DeGagné and ask: How do we continue to help at this point? What should we be advocating for? Mr. Frogner, I know about sustainable funding, and I really liked your last comment about moving beyond community by community. Do you have additional comments?
Mr. DeGagné: I’ll just repeat the one comment I had earlier on the value of Indigenous institutions. I quite quickly skipped over the fact that we have very few institutions in Indigenous life that are non-political. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an analysis on that, but for example, in the 1990s we were building up organizations like the National Aboriginal Health Organization, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, the First Nations Statistical Institute and all of these organizations that could have helped us at this juncture, but we folded them all and closed them all down in the early 2000s.
I think there’s real value in understanding Indigenous institution building. It’s often said when Indigenous People have a challenge, we get a new program, and often it’s one that’s temporary, as my colleague from the NCTR has pointed out, and it doesn’t have long-term funding. When the rest of Canada has these problems, they often get institutions that support that programming. That’s probably the most important thing I can say here, and if that’s all that’s on the record, I’m happy with that.
Senator Francis: In the interest of time, this is for Mr. Frogner. You can put your answers in writing if you wish.
I wanted to ask you about the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, which provided forensic, technical and archival assistance. However, it ceased operations in 2025 when its funding agreement expired.
Can you elaborate on the work of the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials and the impact of its termination? Where can Indigenous communities now turn to for independent, trusted and expert support? How are they being advised on the reliability and suitability of different technologies? Finally, if there is a gap, how should it be addressed?
Mr. Frogner: Thank you, senator. That’s a very good question. In that committee, we were supplying — and I was on the committee as well — guidelines for ground-penetrating radar and for digital research in archival environments. We were supplying these kinds of guidelines and advice to communities and research groups that were coming to us, and we were making it freely available. There is a growing sort of swell of predatory private companies that are selling their software and licensing out to communities and gaining data that the communities then no longer hold control over and have lost in certain cases because of the contracts they’re signing over.
We were offering free advice on these kinds of pathways that could avoid these situations. I think reinstituting this group would be the most successful route because I do think we were starting to create a large groundswell of guidelines and supporting documentation that communities were beginning to turn to. After only a couple of years, communities are just starting to recognize that we were a good, trusted resource to use and turn to for this advice. Just as it was starting to become effective and have an impact, it seemed like that’s when the funding ended and we had to disband.
The best route would be to reinstitute that committee because it was offering free and sophisticated or professional advice on the various issues that these research groups encounter as they do their investigations.
Senator Francis: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you to our witnesses.
I have one really quick question. I will not ask for responses. If you feel like sending a written response, that would be great.
I too am deeply concerned about the loss of records. I too am deeply respectful of people’s wishes in sharing their stories, whether that is now or 50 years from now — generations from now.
The year 2027 isn’t that far away. Is there an opportunity to stay that date and change that? If there is, what would be the plan for these records, given that there are diverse opinions on whether to save or not to save, and whether to store or not to store — all of those — but would that buy some time, then, to put together a plan that might be acceptable to all parties?
I leave that thought with you both, and if you would like to respond in writing to that, it would be lovely. Thank you.
Thank you for being here today, Mr. Frogner and Mr. DeGagné.
(The committee adjourned.)