The federal justice minister is being urged to support a recent request from survivors of a notorious Ontario residential school to reopen their compensation cases.
For years, the government resisted handing over the material, which proved there was systemic physical and sexual abuse at the school, until a court order recently forced it to do so.
“If we take the promise of reconciliation seriously, then the breaches of the legal rights of these survivors by the federal government must be addressed,” Angus said in the Dec. 7 letter, obtained by the Star.
“To achieve this end, I am asking you to support the recent request by some of the survivors to the Ontario Superior Court to re-open their cases, which were adjudicated under a false evidentiary narrative, and this would include supporting the potential opening of other cases not given proper or full hearings.”
Angus also asked Wilson-Raybould to investigate the “operating culture” within the justice department, demanding to know why it’s possible that the government’s lawyers were able to withhold key evidence about St. Anne’s for so long.
The justice department did not return the Star’s request for comment.
The letter comes as a St. Anne’s survivor, whose claim was rejected, is asking Toronto Superior Court Justice Paul Perrell to order a new hearing for compensation and to remove federal lawyers from any new Independent Assessment Process (IAP) hearing.
Survivors have spoken about numerous horrors at the school, including regular beatings, being forced to eat their own vomit and shocked in an electric chair.
“For us, being inmates of the school, we had absolutely no protection,” St. Anne’s survivor Edmund Metatawabin told the Star. “You couldn’t fight back because you would get it worse. You couldn’t talk back. You would get it worse. And knowing there’s no protection, you just take whatever is given to you.”
The survivor — whose identity is not disclosed in the court documents — testified in an IAP hearing in May 2013 that he had been sexually abused by a priest over many years when he was a child. He was denied compensation.
Evidence that was later turned over by the government shows that the priest was indeed a serial sexual abuser, according to the survivor’s notice of application.
“There is now reliable and trustworthy evidence that the priest and assistant administrator were known to be engaging in sexual abuse of St. Anne’s students during the time that the applicant was at St. Anne’s IRS,” says the survivor’s notice of application.
“The new narrative confirms widespread sexual abuse of children by various perpetrators at the times that this applicant was a student at St. Anne’s IRS to give rise to high levels of harm and maximum aggravating factors.”
The application also includes a request that the court determine a “fair and expeditious process” for obtaining legal advice for possible re-hearings of IAP claims from St. Anne’s survivors made prior to Nov. 1 of this year.
Angus told the Star he hopes the new Liberal government will not fight the requests for new hearings, pointing out that the government has made building strong relationships with First Nations a priority and has committed to implementing the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“How is it that the justice department of Canada, with its endless resources, can victimize some of the most marginalized people in the country in hearings that were meant to be non-adversarial and that were supposed to bring closure to them?” he said.
“In this case, we now have evidence that because of the suppression of documents, people were not believed and the justice department said there was no credibility to their stories.”
Perrell ordered the federal government in 2014 to turn over St. Anne’s evidence stemming from a 1992-1996 OPP investigation into the school, after the government tried for years to keep it secret. The thousands of pages included affidavits from survivors and transcripts from criminal trials in the 1990s.
“It’s serious because people went through this IAP process and have been re-victimized by present federal officials who didn’t do their jobs,” said the survivor’s lawyer, Fay Brunning, who has represented many other residential school survivors.
“How is that any different than 40, 50 years ago when they were abused and federal officials didn’t stop it? Didn’t intervene?”