Twenty-four thousand dollars and what you’d assume about a class-action lawsuit

I was hungry and tired for six years, and I was absent a rebellious streak. Then a teenager, I assumed that when it came to food, sleep and mental health, the system would do right by us. Questions of privilege hadn’t entered my lexicon, and it was Canada after all.

But ninety kilometres due south of the capital, Ottawa, was my boarding school, a religious institution called Grenville Christian College, or GCC, that was being run entirely by Americans.

The staff who populated this boarding school beheld ‘the outside world’ with suspicion and let themselves be led by a sparsely educated headmaster from the American South with a clerical collar and a stentorian way of interrupting our meals. He kept his microphone next to his dinner plate, delighting in startling the dining room with impromptu pronouncements.

Occupying that dining room quietly, a state of affairs that seems commendable on the surface for a roomful of young students, was the only option, even if we’d known everyone at our table for years. Words were risky and opinions even riskier at meals where you were reliably told off for passing the salt if it didn’t accompany the pepper. The unending threat of censure taught us to blank ourselves out, subduing normal questions we held about religion or science or staff members’ lives before the school. This didn’t stop the man on the dais, who’d get you for thought crimes. “Table 28 has a bad attitude” rang out from the dining-room speakers.

Because of course he was on a dais, and from there he unfurled the illustrated paper timeline that proved our world was about six thousand years old. (The leader of a school, ladies and gentlemen.) I watched him step down from there to extract attention from a pre-verbal staff kid who was getting better at walking but probably didn’t recognise him. He spoke at him, demanding a response that was well beyond what a toddler could concoct until the little guy cried in fear. Five feet away the kid’s parents smiled and apologised, acting like they loved it. Minutes later, after the danger passed, the mother practically sighed: “Well, we have to live with him.” I seethed that staff knew how backwards the leadership was but went along with it for decades. I could self-select away from one party’s cruelty, but when all of the adults are in on the fix, there was no escape.

In my docile obedience, by seven years old I had internalised the cartoons and storybooks about kids not understanding their parents’ burden, and so when things didn’t make sense, I just figured it was me who didn’t get it. I now love the fiery, good-spirited kids with attitudes, what with their talking-back and clarity on matters that are evidently, terribly stupid. (You were a high-school hero, Joanna.) I stayed quiet.

A group of GCC students brought a lawsuit against the headmasters and administration, and they won. I won’t make a direct case here for how the school despoiled my ability to make sense of the world. I struggle watching our American friends who may surmise that a former president of theirs is unworkable only after he’s done in by multiple juries for fraud and election interference. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but if you need the courts to tell you what’s right, do you think maybe your brain is kind of broken?

As for what the Canadian courts said about my high school, let’s go to the settlement FAQs to answer the question ‘What is this class action about?’:

[T]he Ontario Superior Court in 2020 and the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2021 have since affirmed that GCC utilized practices and policies which amount to child abuse: they created an environment of control, intimidation and humiliation that fostered and inflicted enduring harms on its students.

Yep. I could’ve told you that thirty years ago. No need to rely on the legal system to characterise the nature of our lived experience. The language of the settlement reads that ‘the Defendants are not admitting, or are to be deemed to be admitting, any liability for damages’. I’d add the word ‘not’ ahead of ‘to be deemed’ for clarity, but it doesn’t hurt me that we don’t have a formal admission from bad actors. The court system is a bumpy, if necessary, road to justice when it comes to emotional damage.

Making you understand the story of this school isn’t so important. Cults are rare; you’ve got 99 problems and a climate crisis is one, so you can ignore this unlikely saga guilt-free. (Read, watch or take in the court transcripts if you’re keen.)

But in my little world, I’m free to ask who’s responsible. I’m neither a comedian nor a novelist, so criticising my family in public, or in this forum, is not an option. Airing one’s dirty laundry isn’t a good look, anyway, whether here, or at the office, or anywhere in front of the wrong audience, but complainants get a pass when they’re making people laugh – try making your snide comments at parties quick and biting before changing the subject to avoid listener discomfort – or if you’ve got real chops you can do it cleverly in book form. If you don’t write well, publishing a screed is too risky. Check with your therapist first.

While watching my words, I put to you that something’s strange. What basic assumptions do you hold about a class-action suit? Were your name to come up at trial, would your family ask you about it? If the case was settled with monetary damages, would you expect it to be raised at the kitchen table? If you had gone to boarding school, would you not have assumed that the people who sent you there would have wanted to know how it was going? If the national newspaper ran a cover story exposing the high-demand, high-control religious institution you and your siblings attended, do you assume they’d mention it?

I was standing in my sister’s comfortable Toronto kitchen with her high-school friend from New York, one of those people who breeze through the room carrying a sort of energy of decency, comfortably rather than assertively kind to whoever’s there, the sort of pretty person who becomes even prettier once you get to know them. We weren’t discussing Grenville, but when it got a mention, her cheerful voice turned. ‘Gawd, that place destroyed me.’

It was just an aside, and I kept my body language unreadable while my brain exploded, first from hearing someone I didn’t know well acknowledge suffering that was also mine, and then from the high-stakes novelty of a family member being presented with the GCC question while I was in the room.

I looked to my sister, who was shaking her head. ‘Terrible,’ she said, evenly and authentically. ‘That’s just terrible.’

Internally wide-eyed but externally unchanged, I screamed inside: ‘But you were THERE.’

Once the verdict had survived the final raft of appeals in 2022, I joked about getting my $200. This was not the United States; Canada’s systems aren’t so flush with lucre. Chasing ambulances is both frowned upon and less likely to make anyone rich.

The settlement has more dimensions than this, but if approved by the court in November, students who were at GCC for a year will be granted $1,500, and anyone there for four or more gets $24,000. Unless it’s applied to Joanna, I can’t use the word ‘hero’ without irony, but for doing the hard work of seeing this case through the courts from 2008 until now, I want the four surviving plaintiffs, and the long-suffering lawyers, to know that they’ve been spending their time doing something important, and that’s not something everyone alive can say.

My sardonic joke, which I express quickly and bitingly, is that I was trapped at the school for a lot longer than those four whiners. And now that the comedy bit is done, let me end this short novel.

You’ve heard this before and maybe assumed it yourself: money doesn’t undo the past. But I’m glad – or relieved? assuaged? – that a public institution Canadians more or less stand behind, namely the courts, used its position to affirm that children in your care can’t be treated this way.

When the people who are supposed to do the right thing aren’t even trying, when parents and family look the other way, I’ll take a faceless administrative state drawing a line in the sand. I can’t even feel the money, but it’s still some kind of broken-down catharsis.