Ottawa seems more committed to saving money than to achieving justice for residential school survivors.

“I remember being in the dining room having a meal. I got sick and threw up on the floor. Sister Mary Immaculate [Anna Wesley] slapped me many times and made me eat my own vomit. So I did, I ate all of it. And then I threw up again … Sister Mary Immaculate slapped me and told me again to eat my vomit. … I was sick for a few days after that.”

The speaker is the Rev. Andrew Wesley, a survivor of St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario, quoted in Charlie Angus’s new bookChildren of the Broken Treaty, which traces the history of Treaty 9 as well as of that the Indian Residential Schools system. Today Andrew Wesley is the Aboriginal Priest for the Anglican Church of Canada’s Archdiocese of Toronto. But in the mid-1950s, he was only one of several children at St. Anne’s whom Anna Wesley forced to eat their own vomit. Though she pled not guilty, Wesley was convicted in 1999 of assault and administering a noxious substance.

St. Anne’s is probably most infamous, however, for having a homemade electric chair that was used to punish children. Edmund Metatawabin, today an author, unfortunately experienced the chair. In a 2013 affidavit to Ontario Superior Court, he wrote, “I cannot describe how intense the pain was. I could not scream. At St. Anne’s, if you were being beaten, you could not scream or cry or the punishment would keep up.”

These were not isolated incidents: Children of the Broken Treaty reports that an OPP investigation nearly a half-century after the abuses took place collected 860 complaints of children being raped, sexually assaulted, tortured, beaten, and otherwise physically abused by 180 identified perpetrators. What took place at St. Anne’s could only be described as a crime against humanity. What kind of people would defend that?

The answer, painfully enough, is the Canadian Department of Justice — in the present day. Under the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) that was created as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the Department of Justice is in the strange position of having to defend Canada against these accusations while also having to prepare evidence for the hearings on behalf of the survivors in order to determine their settlements.

When asked about these allegations, however, what the lawyers did was to claim that there were “no known incidents found in documents regarding sexual abuse at Fort Albany [Indian Residential School].” Yet they were holding back documents including all the information about the 180 named perpetrators, and the 860 complaints. Angus writes that Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt wrote to him that “of course” the government was aware of the evidence. But instead of handing it over, as it was mandated to do, it appears it simply lied to survivors of child rape because it allowed the government to save money paid out to compensate for ruined lives.

So survivors sued, and the Ontario Superior Court compelled government lawyers to release the documents that proved the crimes had been committed. Sault Star commentator Tom Mills noted at the time that though the court did not conclude the lawyers had acted in bad faith, they were nonetheless employing “highly adversarial civil law procedures to residential school compensation hearings, which are supposed to be non-adversarial.”

When the government lawyers complied with the court’s order, survivors found the names of accused parties and witnesses blacked out. According to lawyer Fay Brunning who represents over 50 survivors — who are suing the federal government yet again for the unredacted information — this rendered the documents “nearly useless.” How else can a sensible person interpret this action than as an attempt to prolong the legal battle and drive survivors away from demanding restitution for their suffering, so that the government could save precious federal dollars?

The barbarism of St. Anne’s was only a short step removed from what took place under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or under the Serbian leadership during the Balkan War. As Canadians we imagine the distance of that step an enormous gulf: we take comfort in the notion that while staff and teachers at this government-designed, church-run school raped, electrocuted, beat, and tortured children, they didn’t torture them to death.

What would we as a country have to have done to those children in order to get the federal government to acknowledge that taking responsibility for our own historical evil is more deeply necessary than saving any amount of money on compensation payouts?

Three years ago, then-Public Security Minister Vic Toews famously howled that the public can “either stand with [the Harper government] or with the child pornographers.” Today we discover that the Conservatives are happy to stand with pedophiles and child-torturers so long as the price is right — and the victims are Native.

Jesse Staniforth is a Montreal-based freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation magazine, serving the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee and the communities around James Bay.