Ottawa, plaintiffs agree to settle lawsuit over 'Indian hospitals'

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree holds a news conference at the Liberal cabinet retreat in Montebello, Que., on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA — The federal government announced Thursday it has reached a settlement with plaintiffs who filed a class action lawsuit over their experiences at so-called “Indian hospitals.”

The federal government ran 33 such hospitals between 1936 and 1981. Former patients, some of whom spent years in the segregated facilities, filed a lawsuit against the government in 2018 alleging the hospitals were rife with abuse and unfair treatment.

Instead of settling the case through the courts, the federal government and the plaintiffs' lawyers have been negotiating.

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree announced Thursday the federal government has agreed to pay compensation to individual survivors in the range of $10,000 to $200,000.

Ottawa is also earmarking $150 million for a healing fund and $235.5 million for research and education on Indian hospitals.

“I am so glad we have finally reached this stage in the settlement agreement. This class action has been going on for more than seven years,” said representative plaintiff Ann Cecile Hardy in a media statement.

“It has been an exhausting process. For me personally, it has taken most of my adult life to come to terms with what Canada did to me when I was a child.”

The Federal Court will decide whether to accept the settlement during a hearing on June 10 and 11.

“We have a long and painful history in Canada of dispossession, of isolation, of mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples on a range of issues which were very much centered on government policies that have had intergenerational harm and that has caused a great deal of social inequity within Canada,” Anandasangaree said.

“Compensation will not bring back your lost childhood or the three years spent in treatment for (tuberculosis), or loss of language and culture. But we do know that this is the way ... our legal systems work, and it in part recognizes that harm.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 6, 2025.

Alessia Passafiume, The Canadian Press