Residential School Burial Search Fund Cut

Ontario committed $10 million in 2021 to help search the grounds of former residential schools. The Support for Indian Residential School Burial Sites fund grew from there, receiving $31 million to $32 million in each of the past three fiscal years. This year it drops to $20 million, according to Ashley Monture of the Survivors' Secretariat, who said the reduction was revealed in a meeting with staff of Ontario's Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and First Nations Economic Reconciliation. The Trillium, Aug. 14, 2026.

Monture described what the reduction means in practice: "there will be no survivors' gatherings... further staffing reductions... difficult decisions about what parts of the search can continue and at what pace." The cut could lead to job losses.

The accountability problem sits alongside the money. The Ford government has refused to release an audit of the residential school search program, arguing that the audit "contains financial information that relates to the relationship between Indigenous communities and the province of Ontario" that could harm that relationship if released. Withholding an audit of a program while reducing that program's funding removes the one document that would let the public assess whether the money was well spent.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford's office did not address the cut specifically. Spokesperson Lachlan Fraser said the government has spent more than $144 million in total and is "responding with greater flexibility for commemorative and legacy initiatives, survivor engagement and mental health supports, informed by community feedback as they move from investigations to commemoration." The Survivors' Secretariat's account is that the investigation is not finished.

The Survivors' Secretariat is searching the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute in Brantford, the longest-running residential school in Canada, which operated from 1828 to 1970 and through which roughly 15,000 children passed. About 2.75 per cent of the 600-acre site has been searched so far using ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR, and drone and thermal imaging.

That fraction of the site has already changed the record. Researchers have identified more than 6,200 children who attended, verified more than 100 deaths — up from the 48 previously reported by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation — and established that children from more than 60 First Nations attended, not the 22 originally thought. More than 2,100 people who worked at or were associated with the school have also been identified.

The work is not close to done. The Secretariat is still waiting on the federal government to release 27 million more documents. A funding reduction at this stage does not pause a completed project; it slows an active investigation that has been steadily correcting the historical record.

Provincial funding is tightening at the same time as federal funding. Ottawa moved in 2024 to cap each community's searches at $500,000 and reversed the decision after criticism, and planned funding for Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada is estimated to drop from $14.6 billion in 2025-26 to $5.2 billion in 2028-29.

As the researcher put it in the article's title, reconciliation is "losing the battle to a budget." With the program audit withheld, there is no public accounting to weigh against that.