OTTAWA, Canada — The Anglican Church of Canada has reached an agreement with the Canadian government over how to pay compensation to thousands of aboriginals who say they were abused at church-run residential schools.
The deal, announced Nov. 20 in Ottawa after years of negotiations, will see the Anglican Church pay 30 percent of claims against the schools it ran, to a maximum of $25 million (Canadian dollars). Taxpayers would be responsible for the rest. The Anglican Church of Canada operated about one-fifth of the more than 100 boarding schools that existed in Canada up to the 1970s, when the last were shut down. The federal government financed the live-in schools as part of its attempt to assimilate natives to Christian, European culture.
Many aboriginals have claimed they endured sexual, physical and emotional abuse at the strictly run schools, which have been the subject of more than 12,000 lawsuits in the past decade. So far only a few dozen lawsuits have been resolved in the courts.
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