Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak to Bill C-32, a bill on establishing a victims bill of rights for Canadians.
As New Democrats, we are certainly interested in the issues of the bill going forward. We are particularly interested in a number of provisions, including the widening of the definition of “victim” and the creation of a complaints mechanism for victims to file a complaint to a federal or provincial agency if they feel their rights under the charter had been denied.
I was looking at that particular provision this week when the survivors of St. Anne's Residential School were once again in the Ontario provincial court over the Conservative government's obstruction of a provincial court order calling on the federal government to release thousands of pages of police testimony regarding the crimes that were committed against the children at St. Anne's. When we talk about victims, I think it is important we say that, under the current government, there are two kinds of victims in this country, and unfortunately for first nations victims, their rights continue to be undermined.
Under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a legal agreement was put in place because Canada was found to be the defendant in thousands of cases of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse against first nations residential school children.
Under the residential schools agreement, the independent assessment process was established. It was supposed to be non-adversarial to allow the victims of these horrific crimes to tell their story and be compensated. However, as the people of St. Anne's found out, this process was anything but non-adversarial. I will certainly be looking at Bill C-32 in terms of the complaints mechanism that needs to be in place for victims.
Under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the Government of Canada's representatives from the Department of Justice played two roles. One role was to be the lawyer for the defendant, which was Canada, and so they were there to defend Canada's interests. However, they were also there to create the evidence narrative and provide the court hearings with all the evidence that the claimants needed. They told the claimants that they did not need to bring their lawyers. They just needed come and tell their stories. The evidence would be there, and they would look at it.
However, when the people from St. Anne's went into the hearings, they found that the federal government had prepared a false evidence narrative. The narrative was essentially a lie that was being presented at a legal hearing.
The narrative stated that there was no known documentation of sexual abuse at the Fort Albany Indian Residential School. The victims who came forward to tell their stories were being challenged day after day by Department of Justice lawyers who said that there was no evidence to back up their cases. Now, what the federal government did not tell the survivors, nor the adjudication process, was that it was sitting on thousands of pages of police testimony of the horrific crimes that were committed at St. Anne's.
In fact, in a 2003 affidavit, the federal government obtained this information from the Ontario Provincial Police, which identified 180 perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse, including the actual torture of children at St. Anne's, from 154 different plaintiffs. It also collected over 860 witness statements that verified the crimes.
Many of these criminal acts were not prosecuted in the Ontario court because many of the perpetrators had disappeared, could not be tracked down, or were dead. However, a number of criminal convictions did come forward. One of those criminal convictions is against Anna Wesley. Therefore, the federal government was aware of these horrific crimes and had the evidence.
In the 2003 affidavit by the Department of Justice to obtain this evidence, it told the Ontario provincial court at the time that it would be unfair for the defendant if its representation did not have access to this information. However, what was unfair for the defendant was considered perfectly fair for the survivors, the victims, who went in without this evidence.
Then, in the 2003 court ruling, the evidence was transferred to the federal government. The court said that future plaintiffs should also have access to the evidence. However, that did not happen.
The government lied to the survivors of St. Anne's and it lied to the independent assessment process. In 2012, as the process was going on with claimant after claimant being challenged over the fact that they had been put in homemade electric chairs for the amusement of the staff or forced to eat their vomit when they were sick, the federal government was saying that it had no evidence to back this up. However, the victims' lawyers found out that the government had this evidence and challenged it, but then the federal government said that it did not have to produce it.
The very federal legal institution that was there to protect the victims would define the independent assessment process. In July 2013, I wrote to the Indian Affairs minister and asked how it could be that the government would have produced a false evidence narrative and suppressed evidence in a legal hearing.
He wrote to me:
Canada is, of course, aware of the Ontario Provincial Police investigations regarding the St. Anne's...Residential School and resulting...trials.
But then he said that they had no legal obligation to seek out the documents. He did not say they were sitting on the documents, that they had the documents. He then said the evidence was not admissible.
This is what he said:
The statements made to the Ontario Provincial Police in the course of their investigation...cannot in Canada's view, be used as evidence in the Independent Assessment Process....only oral testimony of a witness is considered evidence.
That is not true. That is another falsehood. The terms of the IAP state, “Relevant findings in previous criminal or civil trials...may be accepted without further proof”.
He stated then that corroborative evidence does “not need to be submitted to corroborate the oral testimony of claimants”. This is one of the key elements because the independent assessment process actually states:
...the standard of proof is the standard used by the civil courts for matters of like seriousness. Although this means that as the alleged acts become more serious, adjudicators may require more cogent evidence before being satisfied that the Claimant has met their burden of proof....
The survivors who went into that process were lied to. They were told, “you don't need to produce evidence, just come and tell your story”, when it actually said if people are making serious allegations of criminal acts against children, they have to prove it. They sat, with all the access to the evidence, and told the survivors that they were making things up and that they had no evidence to back it up.
On January 14, 2014, this was heard at the Ontario Superior Court. Justice Perell stated that Canada had a legal duty to “search for, collect and provide a report” on the crimes that were committed against these children, and that “Canada's failure to produce OPP documents about St. Anne's compromised the IAP and denied the Claimants access to justice”.
This week, these same survivors were in court again because in spite of a provincial Superior Court ruling, they went back into the hearings and said they are not producing the evidence. The evidence on Anna Wesley and the crimes that she committed against children and the corroborating evidence that was used to convict her, they will not turn that evidence over. They said this to people whose only crimes were that they were first nation children.
The officials told the Ontario Superior Court they could not explain why they had produced a false evidence narrative. They did not know. It was maybe an accident, but that is not true. On July 26, 2013, after I wrote to the Indian Affairs minister, they began an internal rewrite of the narrative and it is called Amendments to St. Anne's Indian Residential School in response to the Member for Timmins—James Bay.
Think of that for a moment. The top legal system in this country, which is there to protect the interests of the law and the citizens of Canada, only started to create a clear evidence narrative after it was outed. Otherwise, it would have continued with the misrepresentation and falsehoods.
Edmund Metatawabin was in court again this week. Edmund is the spokesperson for the survivors. He has to fly down from Fort Albany on his own dime. He has been trying for years and years to get the government to work with him. Instead, all he has found is abuse. He wrote to the justice minister and said, “My god! We were just children, undergoing torture, abuse....the federal government was conspicuously absent and negligent to give us solace and protection” and “nothing has changed” in 2014.
I want to end by saying the government spends about $106 million a year in Indian Affairs fighting the rights of first nations people. That is almost double what it spends going after tax cheats or criminals. I would like to quote Doug Cuthand in the StarPhoenix. He said:
The federal government has adopted an expensive, two-pronged legal strategy....it conducts a scorched earth legal strategy that drags out cases and starves First Nations organizations of funds.... Sitting down for honest negotiations is simply not a part of the government's strategy.
The Conservatives made an apology to Canadians and they undermined that apology. They see only two kinds of victims and first nation victims are never part of their narrative.