Between 1883 and 1923, bureaucrats and politicians found that schools for Aboriginal children tended to become embroiled in the malignant partisan political warfare that was endemic to that era. Indian schools made an easy target for any politician looking for an opportunity to attack the government, and in these years there never was any shortage of would-be marksmen, especially when the issue of denomination and involvement in schooling was concerned. This unhealthy concern with the role of the churches in federally funded education for Native children emerged as early as the spring 1885 parliamentary session.

    Throughout their existence the schools were also the subject of sharp, bitter struggle between and among the various churches. In particular, suspicions among Anglicans and Protestants that the Roman Catholics were gaining an advantage from Ottawa - or parallel fears among the followers of Rome that non-Catholics were receiving something from Indian Affairs that they were not - generated reams of correspondence, not to mention oceans of gall, among both representatives of the churches and agents of government.

    One Tory parliamentarian even referred to the funding of Indian schools as 'the rake-off business' and a system of 'graft to the churches all over the country.'

    Of more significance in the long term were disagreements over the scope and operation of the schools after 1883. One such matter was the definition of the client population. Increasing schooling for Indian girls, not to mention the steady rise in the number of residential institutions in the later 1880s, and the 1890s, was making Indian education a more expensive proposition. Doubt among both bureaucrats and politicians that the results were commensurate with the outlay fueled a sustained drive to reduce funding for residential schools.