CANADA
The Globe and Mail
SEAN FINE AND GLORIA GALLOWAY
TORONTO and OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Apr. 20, 2016
The Canadian government abandoned an appeal of a controversial court ruling that let the Catholic Church out of its responsibility to raise millions of dollars for aboriginal healing programs, court documents show.
The appeal was dropped just six days after the Trudeau government took office.
The revelation comes in a week when the Liberal government has repeatedly said that it had no options for appeal. It did not mention, however, that an appeal had been commenced and then withdrawn.
The abandonment of the appeal means that a major element of Canada’s historic 2007 settlement – the contribution of the Catholic churches, which ran most of the residential schools, to the aboriginal community – was brought to an end by a lone Saskatchewan judge, in an informal hearing called a Request for Directions.
The ruling by Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Neil Gabrielson on July 16 found that the former federal Conservative government had inadvertently released 50 Catholic entities from their contractual responsibility to try to raise up to $25-million for aboriginal healing pro- grams. He ruled that there was a “meeting of the minds” between a federal lawyer, Alexander Gay, and a lawyer for the Catholic entities, Gordon Kuski, on a re-lease from all obligations. He also found that Mr. Gay should be presumed in this dispute to have had the authority to negotiate on be-half of the Canadian government.
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