If the Supreme Court of Canada will accept a case brought by residential school survivors who have fought Ottawa for years to release thousands of records, the decision will be made today.
The group of St. Anne’s residential school survivors in northern Ontario is turning to the nation’s top court after battling the federal government for documents for ten years.
The survivors claim that by withholding evidence of abuse when determining their compensation, the government violated the terms of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
What financial compensation survivors would get was determined by the 2006 agreement between the federal government, residential school survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, and churches.
Documentary evidence was supposed to help determine the payments made to those who suffered physical and sexual abuse while being forced to attend the church-run, government-funded institutions.
Up until 1976, St. Anne’s served the Fort Albany First Nation and is famous for its horrifying abuse tales.
Edmund Metatawabin, a survivor and former chief of the First Nation, said that children at the school were sexually abused, punished with shocks delivered by electric chairs and forced to eat their own vomit.
In its fillings, the St.
According to Anne’s survivors, the administration and enforcement of Canada’s mandated disclosure duties to each claimant under the Residential Schools Settlement Agreement “have been significantly procedural and jurisdictional loopholes exposed.”
About 60 claimants successfully sued the federal government in 2014 for refusing to make available, as part of the compensation process, the transcripts of criminal trials, investigative reports from the Ontario Provincial Police, and civil procedures involving child abuse.
According to the survivors’ pleadings, those pages list “persons of interest” in the investigations and describe the abuses that occurred at St. Anne’s.
In 2014, the Ontario Superior Court mandated the production of the 12,300 pages of records.
The survivors claim that because the government’s records were significantly censored, it was still difficult to calculate just compensation.
According to the court brief, the issue is fundamentally about the need to give survivors access to justice.
Due to Canada’s failure to provide relevant evidence, claimants might have had their individual claims for child abuse underpaid or refused compensation.
An attorney for Canada is requesting that the appeal’s leave of absence be denied. The federal government has insisted that it has complied with its disclosure requirements for documents.
Noting a breakdown of trust resulting from the case, the federal Liberal government asked courts in spring 2021 to allow an independent review of claims by former St.
Anne’s students—a procedure against which survivors protested.
Finally released in December, the report made a suggestion that the federal government look into the cases of 11 survivors.
Because legal arguments were framed around an appeal to the independent review itself and the review had already been completed, the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the most recent appeal by survivors as “moot” in December.
However, the survivors’ group claimed in its brief that “basic questions remain unanswered,” and it is pleading with the Supreme Court to weigh in.
At 9:45 a.m., the court is anticipated to announce whether it would hear the intricate, protracted case.
The Supreme Court will decide after hearing from survivors of Ontario’s residential schools.
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