Former residential school student says info withheld on priest who abused him

CANADA
The Globe and Mail

GLORIA GALLOWAY
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016

Justice department lawyers have been accused of withholding documents that show a priest who worked at an infamous Indian residential school for nearly four decades was a serial sexual predator even as they persuaded an adjudicator to deny compensation to a former student who said the priest abused him.

The man, who was a student of St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont., is asking Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court to rehear his claim in light of the evidence, which was not presented at his closed-door hearing in July, 2014, before an adjudicator of the Independent Assessment Process (IAP). That process was created under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to provide compensation quickly to former students who were physically or sexually abused at the institutions.

In a document requesting directions that was filed in court late last week, Fay Brunning, the lawyer for the man, who is identified as H-15019, is asking that the lawyers for the Department of Justice be removed from any new hearing granted to her client. She also asks that those lawyers be prevented from arguing in any other closed-door IAP hearing for former St. Anne’s students that the police and court records documenting abuse at the school are inadmissible.

In her request for directions – which includes allegations that have not been proved in court – Ms. Brunning asks Judge Perell to, among other things, look at her client’s situation as a test case to determine whether other former students may have been denied compensation, or given less compensation than they were due, because of the lack of disclosure.

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