The Christian denominations reacted differently to the failures of the residential schools. It was clear in the responses of the Methodists and the Presbyterians to the campaign for 'new, improved' day schools early in the twentieth century that many of the leadership in the non-Episcopal churches would have welcomed an opportunity to withdraw from their responsibilities in residential schools. The Oblates and at least a portion of the Church of England bishops, however, remained supportive of the established schooling policy. Finally, the heavy involvement of both the Anglicans and the Oblates in northern missions, where distance, continuing migratory patterns of economic activity, and absence of other facilities made residential schooling necessary longer than in other parts of Canada, also helps to explain why it was that these denominations struggled hardest to preserve a system of residential schools.

      The differing attitudes towards the schools among the Christian denominations, to say nothing of the clash of opinion within the Native population about them, leads to consideration of what the several parties aimed to achieve through residential schools and what results they realised. Too often the existence of three parties - Native people, government, and churches - to the residential school history is not taken into account when analysis is done. The reality is that three distinct interest groups participated in the creation, and contended over the maintenance and eventual closure, of these schools. They had different assumptions and objectives. Similarly, the results that they experienced would lead them to different conclusions about the significance of residential schools.

      Of the three parties involved in residential schooling, the government had the clearest goals, objectives that Ottawa pursued with an implacable determination and consistency from the 1880s until the 1960s. The federal government looked to its Native educational policy to bring about Aboriginal economic self-sufficiency, principally through cultural assimilation and vocational instruction. An important underlying generalisation about Ottawa's approach was that it always sought to accomplish this goal as inexpensively as possible.

      The use of coercion in the Indian Act, the exploitation of student labour, the failure to provide adequate supervision of the missionary bodies, the desire in the 1940s to move to integrated education, and, finally, the urgency to phase out these schools in the 1960s are all to be explained primarily by Ottawa's desire to reduce and eliminate financial obligations to Native people.