Underlying both the ideological and the financial arguments in favour of integrated schooling was the profound disillusionment with residential schooling that had taken hold in the corridors of Indian Affairs by the 1940s. Indeed, Ottawa had been trying to respond to its growing realisation that the boarding institutions were not successful for over half a century. Implementation of the per capita funding system for industrial schools in 1892 had been fuelled in part by awareness that these ambitious schools that sought to prepare their graduates for employment in the Euro-Canadian world were not having the desired effect.

      The other response to the shortcomings before 1914 had been a movement towards greater coercion of parents to surrender their children to the schools.

      The Great War ushered in close to four decades of financial hardship that exacerbated the problems the Native schools faced.

The family allowance (baby bonus) that was created during the Second World War gave Indian Affairs another tool to force parents to make their children available for residential school.

 

      During the 1930s, as during the Great War, Native schooling was one of the many areas of federal government activity that suffered. The Second World War also provided bureaucrats with another means of coercing Native parents to surrender their children to the schools. The introduction of family allowances in 1944 meant that Indian Affairs could threaten to withhold these modest monthly payments from parents who avoided residential schooling for their children.