CANADA
Montreal Gazette
CHRISTOPHER CURTIS, MONTREAL GAZETTE
Lawyers working for the federal government used a technicality to avoid compensating a man who survived sexual abuse at an Indian residential school in Quebec, legal experts say.
The survivor, an Innu man, says he was molested by a priest and a nun while attending a residential school near Sept-Îles between 1969 and 1971. And while a judge deemed the claim “credible” in a 2015 legal document, federal lawyers managed to get it thrown out because it occurred after the school’s administration was transferred to the province in 1969.
A confidential memorandum obtained by the Montreal Gazette suggests the federal government knew this distinction was merely technical. The federal government document shows that even after 1969, the Sept-Îles residential school was being run by the same nun who administered it when it was a federal Indian Residential School with documented cases of sexual and physical abuse.
The claim was one of an estimated 1,000 rejected across Canada because of this technicality — often referred to as the “administrative split.” That estimate, first reported by The Globe and Mail, comes from independent officials who evaluate residential school abuse allegations.
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