The Company of the Cross was a lay religious order which was affiliated with the Anglican Church of Canada when founded in 1957 by Frank Wiems and Ted Byfield.
Although few investigations or lawsuits resulted in claims being against these private schools, a January 19, 1990 child welfare investigation undertaken by Ted Shaw, then manager of the Leduc District Office, described in detail the punishments that were meted out on students by staff at St. John's Anglican School in response to an "abusive discipline complaint.
"[5][6] In an October 21, 1996 Alberta Report article, Byfield wrote that the most traditional of all St. John's schools' rules, was discipline.
[7] In his articles, Byfield described his belief in the use of discipline to strengthen the character of his students by pushing them to their psychological breaking points.
"[7] He admitted that such punishment was "barbarous" in comparison with "what would follow over the next three decades" but it was "unremarkable" when "compared with what had gone before, over the previous two to three millennia of human history.
In his February 8, 2003 Calgary Herald article, Daryl Slade reported on a 2003 lawsuit by a former Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School student, who said that his life was put at risk in 1976, when he was forced to undertake "100-kilometre hike through steep mountain passes and a 500-kilometre canoe trip through some of the most treacherous parts of the North Saskatchewan River" for which the 13-year old was "untrained, unprepared and unsuitable", according to the defendant's Calgary-based lawyer, Vaughn Marshall.
[2] The Company of the Cross also operated St. John's Edmonton Report in the 1970s with the staff of both the school and the paper living as lay members of the religious community.