CANADA
CBC News
By Mark Quinn, CBC News Posted: Jul 24, 2017
A federal government apology to Newfoundland and Labrador residential school survivors is long overdue, according to a lawyer who represented almost a thousand of them in a class-action lawsuit settled last year.
“The judge and all of the lawyers in this case recognize the general urgency to get this thing done. We learn of people within the class dying almost on a daily basis,” said Steven Cooper, a lawyer with the law firm Cooper Regel.
One class member who died recently is Inuk Nicky Obed. When he spoke to CBC news in 2015, the nine-year court battle to reach a settlement hadn’t ended yet.
At the time, Obed said Newfoundland and Labrador residential survivors like him, who had suffered sexual abuse and lost their indigenous languages and cultures, wanted an apology more than compensation for their suffering.
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