Thank you very much for the question.
As I indicated at the beginning of our comments, the reconciliation between victims, offenders, and communities is a core element of our restorative justice and community-based policing initiatives and our vision for our policing and justice systems—public safety—within our territory. Particularly when you have a fairly small community in which persons are expected to reside together for an extended period of time—if not for most or all of their lives—it's absolutely essential that this form of reconciliation take place, so it's uppermost in our minds.
I know that on a separate bill before the Senate, Bill C-10, there was a representative from the Inuit of Nunavut, a public defender from that territory, who indicated the significant impacts of an offender returning to the community without having this process of reconciliation take place when you're dealing with a small hamlet of fewer than 200 people.
The same kind of thinking applies in our case. The residential schools payments, the claim settlement amounts, are intended to try to set right the life of an individual who has been severely disrupted by his or her experience in the Indian residential school system.
The quantum of the settlements, the two types of payments—the common experience payment and the independent assessment amounts—are intended as a form of restitution and an attempt to reconcile the effects of government policy and the actions of the churches on these individuals. These amounts are intended to assist an individual in recovering his or her path in life and then in moving forward.
For these amounts to be reallocated for victims of an offence they may have committed—as I said, in part as a consequence of the adverse effects of the IRSS process—completely undoes the intent of the award and also sets the individual back in terms of the ability to be reconciled within Canadian society.
That being said, the concept of reconciliation is a very powerful customary law principle. Excepting the payments from the basic provisions of the act does not prevent a process whereby individual offenders may consider whether any amount of that payment might be paid by them to the victim in their personal journey to reconcile that particular act.