The discovery last month of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried haphazardly outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School captured Canada’s attention and once again forced the country to grapple with its long history of residential schools.

And it is a long history. The first boarding schools for Indigenous students were set up in the early 1600s by Catholic missionaries, with limited enrollment. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s before the schools started to proliferate.

Confederation kicked off a new period of growth, with three large new schools built in 1883, and expansion westward bringing new schools along with it.

In general, the schools were miserable places. The buildings were poorly built and maintained, with limited heating in the winter and poor ventilation in the summer. The food was terrible and the staff often completely untrained. One principal at a major residential school asked the ministry for guidance on what his job entailed, only to be told there was no such description.

This lack of supervision and training “created a situation where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers,” according to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, delivered in 2015. The dates and details in this timeline are mostly drawn from the commission’s 500-page report.

Although the conversation about residential schools sometimes makes the policy sound like ancient history, the last Canadian residential school closed in 1998. Tens of thousands of survivors are still alive and were able to hear the official apology from the Government of Canada, delivered in 2008 by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“We now recognize that, in separating children from their families, we undermined the ability of many to adequately parent their own children and sowed the seeds for generations to follow, and we apologize for having done this,” said Harper.

This timeline of some of the major events in Canada’s history of residential schools shows the legacy reaching deep into the past and staying with us longer than many realize.

Early 1600s

The first boarding school specfically for Indigenous people was created by Catholic missionaries near the future site of Québec City. By all accounts, the school was a failure, with few children enrolled and with many who did attend fleeing at the first opportunity. Over the next 200 years, other boarding schools were created with similarly poor results.

1834

The Mohawk Institute, on the Grand River, near what is now Brantford, Ontario opened in 1834. This school would remain open until 1970.

1847

Egerton Ryerson, the superintendent of schools for Upper Canada, urged the establishment of residential schools where students would be taught “the English language, arithmetic, elementary geometry” and other topics. The report led to several new Methodist-run schools in southern Ontario in the 1850s, including the Mount Elgin school, which did not close until 1946.

1867

On the day of confederation, Canadian churches operated only a handful of boarding schools with most of them receiving small, per-student grants from the federal government. As settlement moved west, missionaries and schools followed.

1876

The federal Indian Act was adopted in 1876, defining who was an “Indian” and establishing a process for how status could be lost. The mechanisms could be arbritrary, for example, men could lose status by graduating from a university and women could lose it by marrying a man who did not have status.

1883

The federal government announced plans to establish three large residential schools in western Canada. Speaking in the House of Commons, and in his capacity as superintendent-general of Indian Affairs, Sir John A. Macdonald said the plan is that children “should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

1884

One year later, an annual report from Indian Affairs showed only 27 students at the three schools.

1894

The federal government put in place regulations on attendance at the schools, which would remain voluntary.

1920s

The distinction between the government-run “industrial schools” that aimed to teach job skills and the church-run boarding schools had eroded almost entirely by the 1920s. By the end of the decade, the government almost excusively referred to them as “residential schools.” Speaking in 1920, deputy minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott told a parliamentary committee that “our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”

1930

An annual report from Indian Affairs counts 80 residential schools in Canada. The first residential school in the Maritimes opened in 1930, with most of the other schools operating in western or northern Canada. A few schools remained in southern Ontario, but the majority of schools in the province were located in northern or northwestern Ontario.

1951

The Indian Act was amended to allow agreements with the provinces and school boards to educate First Nations children in public schools.

1960

Government figures show the number of First Nations students attending “non-Indian” schools (9,479) had surpassed the number living in residential schools (9,471) by 1960. The government estimated that 50 percent of the children in residential schools were there for child-welfare reasons. A spike in the apprehension of First Nations children, referred to as the “Sixties Scoop,” was “in some measure simply a transferring of children from one form of institution, the residential school, to another, the child-welfare agency. The schools were not funded or staffed to function as child-welfare institutions,” reads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report.

1968

The federal government divided the schools into residences and day schools, in a massive restructuring of the system.

1969

The government’s partnership with the churches ends, sparking school closures that would lead to the shuttering of most schools by the 1980s.

1977

The closure of residential schools throughout the 1970s was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of children being taken into the child-welfare system. In 1977, First Nations children accounted for 44 percent of the children in care in Alberta and 51 percent in Saskatchewan.

1995

Between 1995 and 1998, the final seven residential schools were closed.

1998

St. Michael’s Indian Residential Schools, the final band-run school, is closed.

2003

An agreement is struck between the federal government and leaders of the Anglican Church to compensate victims who suffered sexual and physical abuse at Anglican-run schools. The government agreed to pay 70 percent of the total compensation, which would max out at $25 million.

2005

The federal government announces a $2 billion compensation deal for First Nations people who attended residential schools. The package included an initial payout of $10,000, with subsequent payments of $3,000 per year, to the approximately 86,000 eligible people.

2008

Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologizes on behalf of the Government of Canada to former students of residential schools. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country,” said Harper.

2009

Pope Benedict XVI expresses sorrow to the Assembly of First Nations for the abuse suffered at Catholic residential schools, although he stops short of an official apology.

2015

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission releases a final report, describing the school system as “cultural genocide,” with 95 calls to action and a demand for an apology from the Pope.

The short-term societal shift brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has been profound. Even aside from the major imposition of lockdowns, we’ve become accustomed to wearing masks everywhere we go, doing business virtually and ordering takeout rather than eating in restaurants.

And as vaccines roll out across the country, reaching an ever-growing majority of Canadians, the remnants of the pandemic that will be more than just temporary oddities are starting to come into focus.

For two of these trends, like the massive drop in birth rates and the housing shortage, the problem was already there, but the pandemic put it into hyperdrive. The supply chain crunch, which saw empty shelves lining our stores, was a hiccup in a global supply system that has drawn mostly positive reviews for decades but may be ripe for improvements.

Here are some ways the pandemic may permanently change Canada.

The baby bust

When lockdowns were imposed last year, there was some initial speculation that it would lead to a baby boom. After all, people are locked inside together. It was inevitable, right?

But human nature isn’t so simple. In times of widespread uncertainty, we’re far more inclined to put off having children, and when we postpone having kids we tend to have fewer of them.

Writing at the Institute for Family Studies in March of 2020, Lyman Stone argued that births were going to plummet, citing data from disasters going back two centuries. Events that cause a lot of deaths, also cause fewer births, argued Stone.

Stone’s prediction was bang-on.

The early numbers from British Columbia show a staggering decline in births in the first quarter of this year, wrote John Ibbitson, the Globe and Mail’s writer at large, and Darrell Bricker, the CEO for Ipsos Public Affairs. Just 8,908 babies were born in B.C. in the first three months of this year, which is an 18 percent drop.

This pandemic baby bust, which has increasingly been showing up in official statistics, is actually the culmination of a decades-long trend in many western countries. And get ready for this to be a dominating issue across the world over the next century.

The situation is especially stark in China. According to the New York Times, China’s population is expected to fall from 1.41 billion people to 730 million by 2100. In that scenario, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds by the end of the century.

On the Move

Thanks to a surge in remote working and an increasingly crazy housing market, the pandemic has sparked a migration and people are moving out of the cities.

The trend was already apparent by the end of 2020.

In its year end outlook in December, Re/Max saw significant relocation happening in the real estate market, with unprecedented sales in suburban and rural parts of Canada. That trend has continued.

Speaking to Bloomberg last week, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said she has been keeping an eye on the situation.

“We have seen actually, during Covid, a lot of Canadians moving to smaller towns, to different parts of the country. There’s been a real boom in Atlantic Canada, for example,” said Freeland. “We’ll have to see what happens with workplaces post-Covid.”

The relocation trend is driven by two features of the pandemic. With many companies embracing remote work, employees don’t necessarily have to be in the same city as their employer. And with the housing market being charitably described as “madness” right now by normally buttoned-up bankers, Canada’s most populous cities are even less affordable. Interest rates are low and the pandemic’s recession has been highly stratified between low income and high income people.

A persistent trend over the last year is that job losses have been to low-paying jobs, while hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs have been added to the economy. Canadians who were able to keep their jobs and work from home have saved money over the last year on commuting and, at times, daycare.

That means that a segment of relatively wealthy Canadians are sitting on a pile of cash, while interest rates bottom out. On top of that, they longer have to go into the office.

So, if the choice is between a ramshackle million-dollar home in Toronto or a house with an ocean view in New Brunswick for $359,000, can you really blame them?

The Supply Chain Crunch

The grocery stores provided some of the most striking images in the early days of the pandemic. We saw people loading their carts with massive packages of toilet paper, empty shelves due to supply shocks and long lines winding around the building as the virus provoked capacity limits on stores.

Those empty shelves and product shortages that still persist today may have spooked retailers into reimagining their entire supply chain.

“With the new understanding that retailers could benefit from a shortened, local and potentially more secure supply chain, governments and industry associations are increasingly incentivizing regional production through both guidance and funding programs,” argues a new report from the Brookfield Institute.

These companies are also required to trace their items all the way through the global supply chain to satisfy regulatory requirements and make product recalls possible. With those costs ballooning, shorter supply chains will only become more attractive.

Consumer preferences may be leading this way anyway, with more people looking for local products, the report says.