It became more difficult to take such an approach when the health and morality statistics became public knowledge as the result of action by a departmental medical inspector. Dr. P.H. Bryce, who had been appointed a medical inspector for both the Interior department and Indian Affairs in 1904, carried out an ambitious investigation of health conditions in the prairie residential schools a few years later at the behest of the deputy minister of Indian affairs. Bryce's findings, which became general knowledge thanks both to the newspapers and to individuals who wanted to discredit residential schools, were that the conditions were simply appalling, so serious as to jeopardize the health conditions of western Indians in general. He recommended an ambitious program to improve the physical facilities in the residential schools and to provide more systematic medical inspection, but for the most part his suggestions were not pursued, or not implemented as thoroughly as he thought necessary. More than a decade later, after he was forced to retire from the federal service in 1921, Bryce attacked the problem and the government he held responsible in a tract entitled The Story of a National Crime (1922).

    Chronologically, antipathy to the ever-expanding system of boarding and industrial schools emerged first within the cabinet and the bureaucracy in Ottawa. The election of a Liberal government under Prime Minister Laurier in 1896 brought Clifford Sifton to the portfolio that held responsibility for Indian Affairs.