Dealing with the Legacy of Native Residential School Abuse in Canada: Litigation, ADR, and Restorative Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent flood of civil litigation suits filed against the federal government and four major Christian churches by former students of Canadian Native residential schools threatens to overwhelm the court system and bankrupt several of the Church organizations involved. Litigation has proved problematic as a mechanism through which to respond to the abuse and other harms experienced in, and by, the residential school system for all the parties involved. Dissatisfaction with the court process has led those involved to look to the mechanisms collected under the umbrella term ‘alternative dispute resolution’ (ADR) in order to find an alternative to litigation. This article suggests that an appropriate resolution to residential school claims cannot be found via the ADR mechanisms currently being suggested or utilized. These ADR mechanisms do not challenge those assumptions underlying the current tort litigation system that are most problematic as applied to the residential school situation. Specifically, they do not challenge the theory of justice animating the current tort law system. As a result, they cannot provide a meaningful alternative to litigation for the parties involved in the residential school cases. Instead, a genuine alternative to the current justice system requires a new lens through which to understand the nature of the conflicts and harms resulting from residential schools. Restorative justice offers just such a lens. In my previous work, I have developed a conceptual framework that views restorative justice as not simply alternative practice but, rather, a comprehensive theory of justice. I will draw upon this work to argue, in this article, that restorative justice provides a new lens through which to envision meaningful alternatives for dealing with the residential school situation in Canada. Grounding alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in this theory of justice would significantly alter their design, process, and purpose.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".