Liberals try to stall ruling in lawsuit
Want to discuss settlement in ’60s Scoop case
An extraordinary 11th-hour federal government attempt to stop a judge from ruling on a bitter eight-year legal fight with aboriginal Canadians over the so-called ’60s Scoop was denounced Wednesday as galling and unprecedented political interference in judicial proceedings.
To opponents of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, it is the latest example of Ottawa saying it wants to advance reconciliation with indigenous Canadians while appearing to do precisely the opposite.
“It’s totally inappropriate,” said Cathy McLeod, the Conservative MP from Kamloops, B.C., who is her party’s critic on indigenous issues.
Charlie Angus, the northern Ontario NDP MP who counts among his constituents many victims of the ’60s Scoop, including the lead plaintiff in the case, Marcia Brown Martel, said Wednesday that the lastminute move by the federal lawyers was “a clear attempt” to sidetrack the victims on the eve of a court decision that is expected to go against the federal government.
“We have a prime minister who stood up after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings and promised to make it right — and then sent his lawyers into court,” Angus said in a phone interview from Waterloo, Ont.
Brown Martel, too, slammed what she said was just another government delaying tactic to avoid accountability for its actions.
“When it comes to a court process, they have not acknowledged the wrongs, the detrimental history, that they have committed upon our people, our aboriginal children in this country,” Brown Martel said.
“They are trying to circumvent that legal process through political manoeuvring.”
Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett, who came under fire on this issue in the House of Commons Wednesday, insists the actions by federal government lawyers are in everyone’s best interests.
“Our government has committed to negotiation and reconciliation and that means moving these issues out of the courtrooms and sitting down in good faith with those who are victims of historic wrongs,” Bennett told the National Post in an emailed statement. “In this case, the government is asking, again, to sit down with all parties to discuss the best way forward to achieve a fair settlement for the claimants and to advance reconciliation between Indigenous people and the government of Canada.”
But in a blistering note to Ontario Superior Court, the plaintiffs — indigenous victims of federal government policy from 1965 to 1984 — urge Justice Edward Belobaba to reject the Liberal government’s request to put his decision on ice one week before he was expected to issue it.
“This unprecedented, unilateral request by (the federal government) brings to mind the only reply that would have been uttered by my late father in similar circumstances, namely the singular Yiddish word: Chutzpah,” Morris Cooper, a lawyer for the indigenous plaintiffs, said in an email to the judge. A copy of that email was provided to the National Post. “No translation does it justice, but it can fairly be said to mean shameless audacity, impudence, gall, or effrontery.”
Belobaba reserved his decision late last week on whether the federal government is liable to about 16,000 at-risk indigenous children in Ontario taken from reserves and placed in non-Aboriginal homes from 1965 to 1984. The plaintiffs, who seek $1.3 billion in damages in the class-action, maintain they suffered a devastating loss of cultural identity.
These survivors have already fought for eight years.
“The minister likes to repeat that her government will be adversaries no more,” NDP MP Romeo Saganash said in the House of Commons Wednesday. “Well, she needs to explain why her government, after announcing negotiations for a national settlement on the ’60s Scoop, is still fighting in court, even trying to stall the decision in (this) case.”
The federal government has fought tooth and nail against the plaintiffs, arguing it has no liability.
That position was denounced in late December by Sen. Murray Sinclair, the former Manitoba judge appointed to the Red Chamber by Trudeau who also led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“It is unconscionable to me that the Government of Canada acknowledged in approving the Convention on Genocide in 1949, that the forcible removal of children from their families in order to eliminate their race is an act of genocide, yet it would argue that it had no legal obligation to prevent it,” Sinclair posted on his Facebook page.
This week, federal lawyer Barney Brucker wrote Belobaba to say the government wanted to discuss the “potential benefits to the negotiations that an abeyance of your decision might have” in light of Bennett’s announcement.
Brucker’s note, obtained by The Canadian Press, indicated the government was prepared to file a formal court motion to block the ruling if no agreement could be reached.
Belobaba, the judge, who had indicated his intention to rule on or about Feb. 16, showed little appetite for wading into the fray.
“It goes without saying that in the normal course, and absent the consent of both parties, a decision is released when it is scheduled to be released,” Belobaba wrote the parties.