system." Federal government After the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was accepted by Prime Minister Paul Martin's ministry in 2005, activists called for Martin's successor, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to apologize. The Cabinet headed by Harper refused, stating an apology was not part of the agreement. On May 1, 2007, Member of Parliament Gary Merasty, of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, introduced a motion for an apology, which passed unanimously. On June 11, 2008, Harper issued an apology on behalf of the sitting Cabinet for past ministries' policies of assimilation. He did this in front of an audience of Indigenous delegates and in an address that was broadcast nationally on the CBC. The Prime Minister apologized not only for the known excesses of the residential school system, but for the creation of the system itself. Harper delivered the speech in the House of Commons; the procedural device of a committee of the whole was used so that Indigenous leaders, who were not members of parliament, could be allowed to respond to the apology on the floor of the house. Harper's apology excluded Newfoundland and Labrador on the basis that the 28th Canadian Ministry should not be held accountable for pre-Confederation actions. Residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador were located in St Anthony, Cartwright, North West River, Nain, and Makkovik. These schools were run by the International Grenfell Association and the German Moravian Missionaries. The government argued that because these schools were not created under the auspices of the Indian Act, they were not true residential schools. More than 1,000 former students disagreed and filed a class action lawsuit against the government for compensation in 2007. By the time the suit was settled in 2016, almost a decade later, dozens of plaintiffs had died. Lawyers expected that up to 900 former students would be compensated. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an apology to Innu, Inuit, and NunatuKavut former students and their families in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. He acknowledged that students experienced multiple forms of abuse linking their treatment to the colonial thinking that shaped the school system. Trudeau's apology was received on behalf of residential school survivors by Toby Obed, who framed the apology as a key part of the healing process that connected survivors from Newfoundland and Labrador with school attendees from across the country. Members of the Innu nation were less receptive, rejecting the apology ahead of the