Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise in this House tonight to talk about some fundamental issues that have to be addressed in terms of the underlying principles of the rules of law and the rights of indigenous people in this country.
We have a government that has defied the Human Rights Tribunal. It has refused the order of Parliament to address the $155 million shortfall in child family services, and continues to carry on that underfunding. As well, the indigenous affairs minister and the Attorney General have gone to the Ontario Superior Court to deny the basic legal rights of the survivors of St. Anne's residential school, and the fundamental questions about the right to the rule of law. All of these actions together show a complete disregard in terms of the government's promise of a new relationship. The indigenous affairs minister has said that the Liberals' attack on the rights of St. Anne's survivors is not an attack on the survivors themselves, but rather that the government is seeking clarification on the term “procedural fairness”. Of course, that is not true. The Liberals are at the Ontario Superior Court to overturn the right of the chief adjudicator to address serious breaches in justice.
What are we talking about? There are two cases. There is victim C-14114, as well as the case of H-15019. This is a horrific story. He was raped as a child by a priest at St. Anne's residential school, and participated in the process to have his case adjudicated fairly. His case was thrown out because the justice department was sitting on thousands of pages of police testimony that identified the perpetrator, the priest, and he could not establish where the priest was. What we know now is that the justice department had put together a person of interest report on this priest that was 96 pages long. It involved numerous witness statements of other acts of child sexual assault, which included 2,000 pages. Therefore, “procedural fairness” to the chief adjudicator meant that because the government suppressed this evidence, he had a right to have his hearing again. However, the government is saying that it will fight that in the Ontario Superior Court.
Of course, we have to ask ourselves why a government, in 2017, would suppress evidence of a serial predator, who preyed on children in St. Anne's residential school from 1938 to 1976. Why would it have that case thrown out? Why would it now be in superior court saying that after being forced to turn over the police evidence to the tribunal, the evidence that the police brought forward now cannot be used? It is saying that there are significant limitations on using new information. This is not new information. This is information that was suppressed by department lawyers from the Attorney General working on behalf of the indigenous affairs minister.
This is also a breach of the fundamental reason that the Liberals obtained this evidence in 2003 when they went to Ontario Superior Court to gather the evidence that identified 180 perpetrators of abuse at the time. Also, the affidavit by justice department lawyer, Haniya Sheikh, stated that they needed access to it to defend the government, and that it would assist all parties in corroborating and substantiating plaintiff evidence.
There is something fundamentally wrong in the law system of our country, if the justice department argues that the evidence sought by these indigenous residential school survivors, who suffered from having their cases falsely adjudicated under false narratives put forward by justice department lawyers who had identified the perpetrators, who had the witness statements, and who had been found out, somehow cannot be used because it would be unfair to the federal government. Canadians deserve better, and the survivors of St. Anne's—
