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By Nina Green
On 4 September 2026, former CBC journalist Connie Walker announced on Facebook that her Indian Residential School Records Project at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) will officially launch at an event on September 30th, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, with former TRC Commissioner and current member of the CBC Board of Directors Marie Wilson, and former TRC Executive Director and Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray, as featured speakers.
Walker’s announcement explains that her project has two very different objectives:
The IRSR project aims to raise awareness about the impending destruction of Survivor testimony and also to create a new archive of records - including lawsuits filed by Survivors prior to the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. [emphasis added]
As explained earlier here, Walker’s first objective — raising awareness about ‘the impending destruction of Survivor testimony’ — undermines the Supreme Court of Canada decision that Independent Assessment Process (IAP) records be destroyed in September 2027 in fulfilment of the strict confidentiality which was guaranteed to former Indian residential school students who claimed compensation for abuse under the IAP. A substantial number of the confidential IAP records are highly personal. Depending on the degree of harm they claimed to have suffered at Indian residential schools, claimants were required to submit treatment records, prison records, education records, income tax records and Workers’ Compensation records, personal documents which most claimants would assuredly not want made public (see attached checklist). Moreover many IAP claimants did not want family and community members to know they had filed an IAP claim, and scheduled their IAP hearings outside their home communities to preserve their anonymity. The first objective of Walker’s project thus violates the guarantee of confidentiality respecting their identities and their personal documents on which IAP claimants relied, and without which they would not have participated in the IAP process.
Walker’s second objective — to create a public archive of the statements of claim which were settled by the historic 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
Walker’s second objective, according to her Facebook announcement (see above), is to create an archive of the statements of claim filed by former Indian residential school students in the lawsuits which were settled by the historic 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (hereafter ‘the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement’ or, occasionally, ‘the Agreement’).
Walker’s sudden interest in these statements of claim resulted from her frustration at being unable to access the strictly confidential IAP records so that she could publish the allegations of abuse made by IAP claimants, and the names of alleged perpetrators. In Episode 7 of her 2022 podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s which was broadcast by the CBC on The Current in 2024, Walker stated that she had tried to gain access to the confidential IAP records by contacting IAP adjudicators, lawyers and private investigators, but could not get them to break the confidentiality agreements they had signed (see attached transcript). Just recently, at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal hearing in Montreal on 26 May 2026, Walker replayed an audio clip from Episode 7 in which she explained that when she could not get people to break their IAP confidentiality agreements, she found a way of getting the information she wanted — unverified allegations of abuse and the names of alleged perpetrators — through a back door.
We hit dead end after dead end [unsuccessfully trying to get people involved with the IAP to break their confidentiality agreements]. Until our reporter Chantelle Bellrichard had an idea.
As Walker triumphantly pointed out in her 2022 podcast, and reiterated at the 2026 PPT hearing, Bellrichard’s ‘idea’ was that Walker could find allegations of abuse and the names of alleged perpetrators in the statements of claim which former Indian residential school students had filed in the original lawsuits which had been settled by the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement. Walker’s back door access is clearly a betrayal of the intent of the Agreement, which aspired to achieve a ‘fair, comprehensive, and lasting resolution’ of these lawsuits. When he oversaw the negotiation of the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci obviously never anticipated that anyone would access the original statements of claim to publicly reveal the unverified allegations of abuse and the names of alleged perpetrators as Walker did in her podcast and at the PPT hearing in Montreal. If Justice Iacobucci had foreseen that Walker would do that, he would assuredly have inserted specific language in the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement to prevent it from happening.
Exactly what are these statements of claim, and how do they relate to the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement and to the claims filed in the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) under the Agreement?
To understand the statements of claim and their relationship to the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement and the claims filed in the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) which was an integral part of the Agreement, we need to look back a quarter of a century.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, former Indian residential school students overwhelmed the federal government and the churches by filing 20,000 individual statements of claim and 20 class actions for monetary damages for alleged abuse at former Indian residential schools (see attached article by Mayo Moran, Independent Chair of the IAP Oversight Committee).
The allegations in these statements of claim were never tested in court because in the spring of 2005 the federal government agreed to let Grand Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations (a federally-funded lobby group which had nothing to do with Indian residential schools) craft a comprehensive settlement of all 20,000 lawsuits and 20 class actions, as well as other issues involving Indian residential schools.
As noted above, the negotiations were overseen by former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci (see attachment), and it was the clear intent of all parties to the negotiations that the statements of claim would never be used publicly because the whole purpose of the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement was to settle the lawsuits initiated by the statements of claim, and financially compensate former students at secret hearings under the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) rather than make them testify in open court and undergo cross-examination as they would have had to do had the statements of claim for compensation gone forward in the court system.
Former Indian residential school students did not have to participate in the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement. They could opt out, and proceed with the individual civil lawsuits they had initiated in their 20,000 statements of claim rather than participate in secret hearings for financial compensation under the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), but it appears no former student did opt out. In the end, 38,276 former Indian residential school students filed IAP claims, and $3.2 billion dollars of Canadian taxpayer money was paid out to settle all outstanding abuse claims, with the average payout being $91,472.82 (see Final Report, pp. 58-9, 88).
But here’s the rub. Because the statements of claim which initiated the 20,000 lawsuits which ended up being settled by the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement had been filed in courthouses across the country, the statements of claim were still publicly available documents, just like statements of claim in other civil lawsuits.
And that’s the loophole Connie Walker took advantage of.
All Walker needed was a list of the lawsuits with their case numbers and the locations of the courthouses in which the lawsuits had been filed. And the federal government conveniently provided her with that list.
Here’s what Walker had to say about it in Episode 7 of her podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s:
CONNIE WALKER: We hit dead end after dead end [trying to get people to break their IAP confidentiality agreements], until our reporter Chantelle Bellrichard had an idea.
CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yeah, it was one of those working backwards sort of light bulb moments, where I was thinking through, okay, if we can’t see the IAP claims, well where did they originate?
CONNIE WALKER: This might seem straightforward, but it was kind of a breakthrough for us to realize there might be another way to get records of abuse claims from St Michael’s. For many survivors, the IAP wasn’t the first time they told their stories. Thousands of them had done it years before when they sued the government and churches. Most of these allegations were never tested or proven in court because many of the claims were dropped so that survivors could participate in the IAP. If we could find those lawsuits, what would be in them? Would they include the names of alleged abusers?
CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: We knew that there were thousands of them filed across Canada, but no way of knowing really how many St. Michael’s survivors had filed civil lawsuits, who they were, you know, who they might’ve accused and where we would get our hands on those records.
CONNIE WALKER: But we didn’t know where to start without the claimants’ names or their case numbers, so Chantelle filed an Access to Information and Privacy request with the Canadian Department of Justice. We wanted to see if they would give us a list of the lawsuits filed by St Michael’s survivors. A month after Chantelle’s request, she got an email back.
CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: It was a spreadsheet, and it was many, many pages long, and it was a list of all of the civil lawsuits that involved plaintiffs or survivors who had attended St Michael’s.
CONNIE WALKER: On every line in this spreadsheet was a case number.
CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: And the list was 482 lines long.
CONNIE WALKER: 482 lines. 482 lawsuits filed by St Michael’s survivors. [bolding added]
Walker used the information the Department of Justice had so conveniently provided to her to access the statements of claim for St Michael’s Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. She then very publicly revealed in her 2022 podcast — and at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal hearing in Montreal on 26 May 2026 — the names of 29 ‘priests and nuns who were accused of sexually abusing children’ at the school.
Walker’s public revelation of the names of 29 alleged sexual abusers at St Michael’s was a betrayal of the $5 billion dollar 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, which was intended to settle all these lawsuits by providing an alternative to going to court, i.e., letting former students tell their stories and receive compensation via the secret non-adversarial Independent Assessment Process (IAP), thereby facilitating reconciliation.
Walker has now publicly announced that she intends to take her betrayal of the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement with regard to St Michael’s further. Via their Indian Residential School Records Project, she and Kimberly Murray now want to obtain the statements of claim filed for five unnamed Ontario Indian residential schools. Moreover they want to have law and journalism students at Toronto Metropolitan University do the work of disclosing the allegations of abuse and the names of alleged perpetrators in those statements of claim, thus shifting the responsibility for betraying the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement onto the students. At the PPT hearing on 26 May 2026, Walker told the Tribunal ‘judges’:
Because the IAP records, the 38,000 records that were recorded through the Independent Assessment Process about abuse at residential school are set to be destroyed next year by order of the Supreme Court of Canada. That is, that deadline fills me with a sense of urgency to try to protect as much as we can from survivors about their accounts of what happened in Indian residential schools.
So I’m currently working actually in partnership with Kim Murray on the Indian Residential School Records Project, which is essentially trying to replicate what we did in surviving St Michael’s by creating a new archive of survivor accounts from the lawsuits that survivors filed that led to the Residential School Settlement Agreement. [bolding added]
Inherent unreliability of the statements of claim filed in the 20,000 lawsuits settled by the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
As already noted, Walker and Murray’s Residential School Records Project raises ethical issues in terms of its betrayal of the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement and its proposed use of students at Toronto Metropolitan University to access the statements of claim.
The project also raises another ethical issue — Walker’s treatment of unverified allegations made in statements of claim as facts which should be revealed to the public. By definition, statements of claim are inherently unreliable. They are merely the plaintiff’s version of events, and if a lawsuit goes forward, the plaintiff’s version of events is tested in court against the defendant’s version.
Walker knows better than anyone how unreliable statements of claim are because their unreliability was brought forcefully to her attention while she was making her podcast, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s. In Episode 7, Walker reported that:
CONNIE WALKER: We saw another familiar name in these court records—Gilles Gauthier. One of the first statements of claim I read was from a survivor accusing him of sexually assaulting her in the front seat of his car. She said her brothers were in the backseat. She said he also sexually abused her in a stairwell at St Michael’s. We read another claim where a survivor said Gauthier made her strip naked in front of him when she was around eight years old. When I spoke to him, Gauthier denied ever sexually abusing children, but [Father Ken] Thorson told us he was credibly accused by 16 survivors. And there’s something else he revealed—they weren’t all from St. Michael’s. Thorson said most of them were actually from two other residential schools in Alberta. From what we can tell, Gauthier was never assigned to work at those other schools. . . . [bolding added]
In other words, former students falsely alleged in some of the 20,000 statements of claim filed in the late 1990s and early 2000s that Father Gilles Gauthier had sexually abused them at two schools in Alberta Father Gauthier had never even worked at. There could hardly be clearer evidence that statements of claim are unreliable, and that Walker and Murray’s attempts to obtain and publish the allegations in them as fact, and name alleged perpetrators, raises serious ethical issues. (And incidentally, there could hardly be clearer evidence that there were serious flaws in the IAP process if most of the 16 allegations were accepted as ‘credible’ by IAP adjudicators when Father Gauthier had never even worked at the schools in question.) Instead of accepting the clear evidence that the allegations in the statements of claim were false because Father Gauthier had never even worked at those schools, Walker treated them as fact. She used them as a basis for interviewing Father Gauthier at a time when he had dementia, and then revealed them in her podcast.
Allegations in the statements of claim are inconsistent with exhaustive years-long investigations by the RCMP and the Ontario Provincial Police
Additional evidence that the 20,000 statements of claim are unreliable, and that students at Toronto Metropolitan University should not be accessing them via Walker’s project, is found in the large-scale investigations of Indian residential schools by the RCMP and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). These exhaustive years-long investigations essentially came up empty, even though they were conducted with the objective of leaving no stone unturned to obtain convictions.
Let’s look at the results of the three police investigations.
(a) The RCMP investigation into Chief Phil Fontaine’s former Indian residential school at Fort Alexander
In February 2010, the RCMP major crimes unit in Manitoba began looking into abuse at the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School. The following year, the RCMP launched a formal criminal investigation.
Why the RCMP initiated a major criminal investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School has never been revealed. It may have had something to do with Phil Fontaine’s 1990 allegations to Barbara Frum, particularly since Fontaine’s Chief of Staff, Bob Watts, during his tenure as Interim Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), told the Globe and Mail on 1 January 2008 that he had ‘met three times with police in the past year to advise them on the accusations former students are preparing to make’.
Whatever its origins, the RCMP investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School was extensive. Over a decade, more than 80 RCMP officers spoke with more than 700 people across North America. They even did ‘door to door canvassing‘. 75 witness and victim statements were obtained. The RCMP also combed through thousands of archival documents in Manitoba and Ottawa including ‘student and employees lists and quarterly [attendance] returns’.
However no charges were laid until two months after the Kamloops Band’s false claim that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children‘ at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. According to a CBC article on 27 July 2021, at that time the RCMP finally ‘forwarded its findings to the Manitoba Prosecution Services to review and determine whether charges [were] warranted’.
In the end, only a single charge was laid. A 92-year-old Oblate priest, Arthur Masse, was arrested in June 2022 and charged with indecent assault. The complainant, Victoria McIntosh, alleged that he had kissed her and ‘fondled her above her clothing’ in a bathroom at the school at some time between 1968 and 1970. Masse was acquitted, as McIntosh’s identification of him ‘was not sufficiently reliable’. Her evidence at trial was inconsistent with statements she had made in 2013 both to the RCMP and in her application for compensation under the Independent Assessment Process (IAP).
In passing, it is worth noting that the fact that no other charges were laid indicates that this decade-long RCMP investigation found no corroboration of Phil Fontaine’s claim to Barbara Frum that every boy in his Grade 3 class was sexually abused in the same way he (Fontaine) had been abused, which is perfectly understandable if the alleged sexual abuse consisted, as discussed here, of nothing more than a routine supervised weekly shower.
(b) The eight-year RCMP investigation into BC’s 15 Indian residential schools
After an eight-year RCMP investigation (1995-2003) into hundreds of allegations of abuse at British Columbia’s 15 Indian residential schools, the RCMP were able to lay new charges against only six individuals, of whom only two were convicted. See the attached RCMP Task Force report, which was buried by the RCMP until 2025.
The Task Force report emphasizes that every single allegation which could have resulted in a criminal charge was investigated — often twice — no matter how unlikely it appeared that a criminal charge would result (pp. 13, 116). In fact, the measures the RCMP took to ensure that every single allegation was thoroughly investigated were unprecedented, including the development of a victim-driven investigation Protocol (p. 13); the use of Indian activist Charlene Belleau (who had been heavily involved in earlier investigations at Williams Lake) as a liaison; the hiring of a private civilian researcher, Christine Mellema (see Task Force Report, Appendix 2, and McMahon, p. 60); and the obtaining of 133 search warrants for records held by churches, religious orders, and the federal government (p.111). However, as the RCMP admitted in the report, they were unable to substantiate the allegations to the extent required to lay charges (pp. 1, 65):
Despite all the effort and resources expended on this file, relatively few criminal prosecutions resulted.
(c) The Ontario Provincial Police investigation into St Anne’s at Fort Albany
In its massive investigation into St Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany from 1992-1998, the Ontario Provincial Police received 860 complaints, and took 992 witness statements. The result? According to CBC journalist Jorge Barrera’s article of 29 March 2018, the OPP could only substantiate charges against two Indigenous nuns who were convicted of assault causing bodily harm, and a cook, a child care worker, and a kitchen worker, who may also have been Indigenous, who were convicted of indecent assault.
There is thus a shocking discrepancy between the allegations in the statements of claim in the 20,000 lawsuits which were filed and the 38,276 IAP claims for compensation, on the one hand, and the results of three intensive police investigations into what must have been essentially the same allegations made by the same former Indian residential school students, on the other hand.
The discrepancy is particularly shocking with respect to the exhaustive eight-year RCMP Task Force investigation in BC from 1995-2003. Because the RCMP investigation encompassed all 15 BC Indian residential schools, the results can be compared to IAP claims from former students of the same 15 schools. That comparison reveals that although the RCMP investigators could only corroborate allegations about abuse at BC’s 15 Indian residential schools to a degree sufficient to lay new charges against six individuals, only two of whom were convicted, yet between 2007-2012, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) received claims for financial compensation for alleged abuse from 6640 former BC Indian residential school students (see Final Report, p. 68). There is simply no way to logically resolve that discrepancy other than to conclude that many, many allegations of abuse accepted by the IAP had earlier been exhaustively investigated by the RCMP, and could not be substantiated. In short, many former Indian residential school students in BC were compensated under the IAP for allegations of abuse that had earlier been discredited when investigated by the RCMP.
That discrepancy raises red flags about both the reliability of the allegations made in the 20,000 statements of claim filed in the lawsuits which were settled by the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement and, as well, about the validity of the non-adversarial IAP process. The discrepancy between the enormous number of allegations in the 20,000 statements of claim which were filed in the original lawsuits, and the almost double number of allegations in the 38,000 IAP claims, on the one hand, and the allegations which could actually be substantiated after exhaustive police investigations in Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia on the other hand, surely tells the public all it needs to know about both the unreliability of the statements of claim in these cases, and about the flaws in the IAP.
What can be done to prevent further release to the public of unverified allegations and names of alleged perpetrators from these unreliable statements of claim?
The simplest solution to that problem is for the Department of Justice to refuse to release to Walker or Murray or anyone involved in their Indian Residential School Records Project any further lists from the 20,000 lawsuits containing the parties, case numbers, and the location of the courthouses in which the statements of claim were filed. The Department of Justice’s decision to release that list in the case of St Michael’s is inexplicable and inexcusable, considering that the Department was obviously well aware that those statements of claim all pertained to litigation that had been definitively settled under the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Walker has even stated she intends to produce a podcast incorporating the results from the statements of claim. On that basis alone, the Department of Justice should refuse to release any lists of lawsuits to her.
But that will not resolve all the problems posed by Walker and Murray’s Indian Residential School Records Project.
As noted above, besides gaining access to the statements of claim, the project has another objective — to undermine the Supreme Court of Canada decision that confidential IAP records be destroyed in September 2027. Walker claims the project will ‘raise awareness about the impending destruction’ of those confidential IAP records.
As explained here, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) assigned the responsibility of raising awareness to the IAP Chief Adjudicator, and specifically prohibited the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from involving itself. The SCC’s prohibition of TRC involvement applies to Kimberly Murray and Marie Wilson, who held key TRC positions at the time.
The IAP process was anonymous. The public does not know who the 38,276 IAP claimants are, and that is the way it was meant to be. No one is meant to be contacting former Indian residential school students and asking them whether they’ve requested a copy of their records to be donated to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). Pressuring former Indian residential school students by asking them that question is by definition an invasion of the privacy and strict confidentiality they were guaranteed under the IAP, and having Toronto Metropolitan University students do that, as Walker and Murray propose to do, raises ethical issues. As the Supreme Court of Canada noted in its decision, 32% of IAP claims involved student on student abuse. It seems very unlikely — in fact it is almost impossible to believe — that the one-third of IAP claimants who accused other students of physically and sexually abusing them would want Walker, Murray, and Toronto Metropolitan University students reminding them of that fact, much less pressuring them to donate their confidential IAP records containing their allegations to the NCTR. Moreover former students who made up stories for financial compensation will almost certainly not want to be reminded of that, or pressured to donate their confidential records to the NCTR. There must be a significant number of IAP claimants who made up stories because of the huge discrepancy between the 38,276 IAP claims and the meagre results of exhaustive police investigations of abuse claims at residential schools. Former students who accused Indigenous staff members will also likely not want to donate their records to the NCTR. For all these reasons, few former Indian residential school students will appreciate being pressured by Walker, Murray, and Toronto Metropolitan University students to donate their IAP records to the NCTR. All Walker and Murray’s ‘awareness’ attempts will do is reopen old wounds.
The ill-considered Indian Residential School Records Project will not advance reconciliation. In fact, it will do the reverse. It should be permanently shelved.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Are Marie Wilson, Kimberly Murray and Connie Walker undermining the Supreme Court of Canada decision on destruction of IAP records?
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https://nevillepark.github.io/trc/appendix-3/. This is the entire list of residential school priests, nuns, ministers, teachers, workers, convicted of crimes at the schools from 1883 to 1996. A few dozen people, many indigenous, a priest, an oblate, two indigenous nuns. That’s it, despite massive police investigations. What the list doesn’t contained is the thousands of allegations of student on student abuse that were made. Many of the former students came from dysfunctional homes and communities and sexual abuse is typical in those cases. Former students only came forward with those painful allegations because they had been guaranteed confidentiality. Walker and Murray now want to violate that confidence. The Supreme Court wisely ruled that the records should be destroyed unless a claimant opted to have them kept in a confidential manner. That decision should be followed. Walker and Murray are reckless activists and should be disregarded
Good points. I trust nothing coming out of this grifting industry.