CANADA
Canada.com
BY MARK KENNEDY, POSTMEDIA NEWS FEBRUARY 6, 2014
OTTAWA — The federal government appears to be dragging its feet on a court-ordered obligation to provide millions of documents from Library and Archives Canada to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that is examining the residential schools scandal.
The records are needed by the commission to learn the truth of the decades-long saga, such as piecing together the role played by the federal government — including former cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats.
Between the 1870s and 1996, about 150,000 aboriginal children were pulled from their homes by the federal government and sent to the church-run schools, where many suffered physical and sexual abuse and at least 4,000 died.
Postmedia News has learned that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, a full year after being ordered by a court to produce the records to the commission, hasn’t even issued a request for proposal (RFP) for outside firms to bid on a contract to sort through the documents at federal archives so they can be passed along.
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