Madam Speaker, what is the price of a political vendetta? If one is the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and is trying to shut down the survivors of St. Anne's residential school, the cost is $2.3 million and counting. That is what the current government has been willing to spend to fight survivors of some of the most horrific child sexual abuse, torture and child rape ever perpetrated in Canada.
What issue is the government trying to suppress? It was the decision by the Justice Department of Canada to take 10,000 pages of evidence, the names of 180 perpetrators, that it was legally obligated to turn over to the hearings of the St. Anne survivors, and instead of presenting that evidence, present what is a lie, in a legal term, a false evidence narrative. It was the department's obligation to present what documents there were to say that there was no history of sexual and physical crimes at St. Anne's. However, there were so many. Bishop Jules Leguerriere is named in the list. There is also Bishop Henri Belleau and Father Langlois. Father Arthur Lavoie has a persons of interest report of over 2,000 pages. That was suppressed.
What was the effect of that? The cases were thrown out. I would never have stood in the House and spoken on a case before hearings, except this was brought to me in 2013, almost 10 years into the process. Edmund Metatawabin came to me and said his people, who have suffered so much, were having their cases thrown out. They were being told they were not believable. He said that justice department lawyers were lying in the hearings, because the department has these documents. I thought at the time, as a member of Parliament, that if I wrote to ask how it were possible in a legal process for them to suppress evidence, this would be handled.
They were forced to turn over documents, but then the question is, what about justice in the cases? Therefore, I wrote to the oversight committee of the independent assessment process asking what happens when the government fails in its duty. No one dealt with it. I wrote to the adjudicators to ask what happens when people are denied their most basic legal rights. No one dealt with that.
What happened was that two cases came forward. This is where the $2.3 million has been spent. One case, H-15019, was by a victim of horrific child rape. Government lawyers said he was not believable, that they could not even prove that the perpetrator had been in the institution at the time, despite the fact they had a massive file on that person. That predator had been at that school for 40 years. The justice department knew it, and it got the case thrown out. When this person used his basic legal rights to go back to reopen that case, the government said it could not be done.
I want to read something. Phil Fontaine rose on this issue at the AFN. He said Canada had a legal obligation, because procedural fairness is a fundamental principle implied in the Indian residential school settlement agreement and the IAP. These were designed to be fair, reasonable and in the best interests of the claimant. In his affidavit he said that he “always expected that the IAP would respect First Nation and Inuit individuals' rights...with a process at least as fair as any other hearing before a court or similar tribunal.”
He said in his affidavit that he would not have signed the agreement if he had known the basic principle of procedural fairness would not be respected. The government lawyers ridiculed Fontaine's position, saying that the court should not give any evidentiary weight to his affidavit—the affidavit of the person who had signed the Indian residential school settlement agreement—and said that his paragraphs were largely speculative and done in hindsight and that it was of no assistance to receive theoretical views of subjective intent. They were not of subjective intent—
