Feds Release 1,200 Pages of Blacked-out Emails about Abuse at St Anne’s Residential School

By Jesse Winter
Toronto Star
April 12, 2017

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/04/12/feds-release-1200-pages-of-blacked-out-emails-about-abuse-at-st-annes-residential-school.html

Students reading in a classroom at St. Anne's Indian Residential School in Fort Albany Ontario. (STAR ARCHIVES)

The federal government is continuing to obstruct justice for the survivors of St. Anne’s residential school by “thumbing their nose” at the information commissioner and releasing 1,200 pages of almost entirely blacked-out documents, NDP MP Charlie Angus says.

Last week the justice department sent Angus’s office the first batch of some 70,000 pages of emails, speaking notes and memos related to the notorious residential school as part of an ongoing access to information request. The disclosure came after the federal information commissioner threatened to sue the government for originally refusing to disclose the documents.

But of those 1,200 pages, all but a handful have been stripped of any information beyond email addresses and the occasional emoji.

“This is clearly them thumbing their nose at the access to information law and the information commissioner who already threatened to take them to court,” Angus said.

Angus hopes the emails he is after will shed light on how and why the justice department decided not to disclose thousands of pages of police records detailing horrific abuse at St. Anne’s during the residential school claims process for survivors of the church-run school.

Neither the justice department nor Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s office returned the Star’s requests for comment.

The justice department previously said it couldn’t release the emails Angus wants because doing so risks violating a court order protecting information related to residential school settlement cases, called the Independent Assessment Process.

“As the definition of ‘IAP Documents’ as stated in the order is quite broad, the access to information office will not take the risk of being found in contempt of (the) order,” wrote a justice department access to information advisor in an email from March 2016 shared with the Star.

Departmental spokesman Ian McLeod previously told the Star the government is waiting for a Supreme Court ruling that it hopes will provide more clarity about exactly what should be considered an IAP document.

Survivors of the school in Fort Albany, Ont., say they were the victims of appalling treatment including sexual abuse, being shocked by an electrified chair and being forced to eat their own vomit.

The Ontario Provincial Police investigated the abuses in the 1990s, conducting interviews with more than 700 survivors and creating thousands of records about the abuse. Five former employees at the church-run school were convicted.

But when survivors of the school — like one woman referred to in court documents as K-10106 — applied for compensation under the residential school’s settlement process, those same police records were withheld even though the government was duty-bound to seek out and provide them.

In the case of K-10106, her sexual abuse claim was rejected by the court.

The reams of police records that could have vindicated her were eventually ordered released in 2014 by Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Perell, and K-10106’s claim was upheld on appeal.

Angus wanted to know how such a failure of the justice system could happen in the first place, and what the minister at the time knew about it.

His office filed access to information requests in 2013 seeking emails, briefing notes, memos and other communication with the minister’s office. He has been fighting for those emails ever since.

Where the department claims an abundance of caution, Angus said he sees a political cover up.

“This is a department that sat on 12,000 pages of testimony documenting rapes and torture of children,” Angus said.

“Someone gave the order to do that. Someone told the minister that it’s okay that we suppressed this evidence,” Angus said.

Of the 1,200 blacked-out pages, only three are readable. One of them is a 2014 email exchange between the justice department’s Alethea LeBlanc and Seetal Sunga, with Indigenous and Northern Affairs.

“I woke up to discussions about the government’s failure to disclose documents about the electric chair on the current (sic) (CBC) this morning,” LeBlanc wrote. “In case you guyts (sic) haven’t heard just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“GOOD MORNING! ugh,” replied Sunga.

“After the national (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) event, things will hopefully quiet down,” Sunga wrote. “I hope your day improves.”