Confidentiality must be kept

Re: Residential school survivors deserve respect, Oct. 30.

Lev Marder suggests former residential school students need to be asked, not told, what will happen to their confidential documents from the Independent Assessment Process. He is right. And this is what the Supreme Court of Canada decided.

As an adjudicator in the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), I have conducted hundreds of hearings since 2003 and I know few of these stories would have been told had claimants not trusted the promise of confidentiality.

If the court had decided this promise could be broken, would that have furthered the spirit of reconciliation?

Marder suggests claimants be approached individually for permission to share their records. How would that be done without already breaching the promise of confidentiality? Many claimants are desperate to conceal from those closest to them the very fact they made a claim. And would it be fair to remind claimants, years later, of events they have fought to put behind them? Many of these people are extremely fragile.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s task was to encourage former students to offer their stories as contributions to the historical record; they received several thousand such testimonies. Unfortunately, the commission then sought access to IAP testimonies, which were given in a different context and for a very different purpose — to prove allegations of abuse.

I understand the desire to protect and preserve these stories, but they do not belong to us. IAP claimants will have 15 years from the conclusion of a claim to decide whether to share their stories with the archive or anyone else. The choice needs to be theirs. Kathleen Keating, Adjudicator, Indian Residential Schools Independent Assessment Process, Vancouver