CANDA
Nanaimo Daily News
The Canadian Press
Published: Thursday, August 16, 2012
Aboriginals who have been denied compensation for their time at Canada’s notorious residential schools because they continued to live at home filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday, arguing they, too, were scarred by a system designed to eradicate their language and culture.
The Tk’emlDups te Secwepemc Indian Band in British Columbia’s Interior and the Sechelt Indian Band on the province’s central coast filed a statement of claim in Federal Court in a case they hope grows to include aboriginals from across the country.
The federal government reached a settlement to compensate residential school students in 2006, two years before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s historic apology in Parliament. But an automatic payment to former residential school students – described as a common experience payment – only applied to those who lived at the schools.
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