Mechanisms of Change: How the Legal Mobilization of Residential School Survivors Led to the Canadian Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement

Abstract

This thesis examines how the legal mobilization of Indian Residential School survivors between 1982 and 2005 led to the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). The IRSSA was the biggest settlement in Canadian history and included an official state apology for the wrongdoing done to Aboriginal peoples in Indian Residential Schools, compensation for loss of language and culture, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and service provision to survivors.

To investigate the causal process between legal mobilization and the IRSSA, I used theory-building process tracing to develop two causal mechanisms. To construct the causal timeline that constituted the empirical basis of my mechanisms, I used interviews, secondary literature, and archival sources, including court documents, media sources, reports, minutes from meetings, and blogs.

I concluded that the mechanisms at play in the IRSSA case were precedent-building and aspiration-adjustment. The first mechanism, precedent-building, holds that legal counsel seizes on openings in the legal opportunity structure and then uses strategic litigation to further open it by building favorable legal precedent, which in turn, further increases the success of legal mobilization. The second mechanism, aspiration-adjustment, states that the culmination of legal precedent led to Canada’s sense that the conflict was unwinnable and its continuation contained unacceptable costs, prompting it to lower its aspirations for an acceptable resolution, namely, conceding universal redress for loss of language and culture, which led to the successful IRSSA negotiations.

By intertwining theory and empirical evidence to construct these mechanisms, this thesis has developed a detailed understanding of how legal mobilization resulted in the IRSSA by decomposing the empirical case into the key activities that transmitted causal force from cause to outcome.