Canada’s supreme court has declined to hear an appeal brought by a group of Indigenous residential school survivors, dealing a major blow to their decade-long fight against federal government over thousands of unreleased documents.
Survivors of St Anne’s Indian residential school had hoped the country’s top court would take their case, which alleges Canada’s federal government withheld crucial evidence in determining compensation for victims of abuse at the school in northern Ontario.
The court did not say why it declined to hear the case, as is standard practice.
But the decision was met with sharp criticism and disbelief by prominent Indigenous voices.
“No words for how horrible this is, how justice is continually denied for St Anne’s Indian Residential School survivors, their families,” the writer Tanya Talaga tweeted. “Canada should have done the right thing when this all first started. Release the records and OPP reports which detail abuse. How hard is this?”
Pam Palmater, a law professor, called the decision “disgusting”, writing on social media that prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet should be “ashamed” after fighting the release of the documents.
St Anne’s, which operated from 1902 to 1976 in the community of Fort Albany, was part of the network of church and state-run institutions where 150,000 Indigenous children were sent as part of a campaign of forced assimilation.
Canada's residential schools
Over the course of 100 years, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian society.
They were given new names, forcibly converted to Christianity and prohibited from speaking their native languages. Thousands died of disease, neglect and suicide; many were never returned to their families.
The last residential school closed in 1996.
Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations, with others operated by the Presbyterian, Anglican and the United Church of Canada, which is today the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
In 2015, a historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission which concluded that the residential school system amounted to a policy of cultural genocide.
Survivor testimony made it clear that sexual, emotional and physical abuse were rife at the schools. And the trauma suffered by students was often passed down to younger generations – a reality magnified by systematic inequities that persist across the country.
Dozens of First Nations do not have access to drinking water, and racism against Indigenous people is rampant within the healthcare system. Indigenous people are overrepresented in federal prisons and Indigenous women are killed at a rate far higher than other groups.
The commissioners identified 20 unmarked gravesites at former residential schools, but they also warned that more unidentified gravesites were yet to be found across the country.
The school was notorious for its widespread abuses, including the use of a homemade electric chair constructed to punish Indigenous children.
In 2006, following an apology from the federal government over widespread abuse and neglect within the schools, a framework was announced to determine compensation.
The process began in 2007 and the settlement agreement between survivors and the federal government included a provision that assigned a fixed payout for children who had suffered extreme abuse while at residential schools.
But survivors of St Anne’s say the federal government breached its obligations under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement after withholding documents that could have affected compensation.
Under the agreement, the federal government was obliged to hand over documents that would help in the adjudication of abuse claims and to determine fair compensation.
But the government withheld thousands of relevant documents, part of an investigation by the Ontario provincial police into allegations of sexual and physical abuse at the school in the 1990s.
As a result of the investigation, four former staff members of the school, as well as one Indian Affairs employee, were charged.
The judge overseeing the settlement said the omission was a “mistake” and appeared to be unintentional. But some survivors of the school allege they lost compensation cases – or received lower payouts – over doubts about the abuse they suffered.
A subsequent investigation into the missing documents concluded the federal government should revisit 11 cases of abuse. The federal government said it would reopen the specific cases.
Before the top court’s decision, the Liberal government had urged the supreme court, through court filings, not to intervene in the case.
Charlie Angus, a lawmaker representing the area where the school operated, criticized the court’s decision.
“The Justice Department suppressed evidence of crimes at St Anne’s. Government lawyers attacked survivors in private hearings. Liberals spent millions to perpetuate this injustice.
Now the supreme court says it trusts the government,” he tweeted. “There is no reconciliation.”
