Humboldt donations are still pouring in; hits $19 million

Committee to begin court-guided task of distributing money to bus crash victims

Donations for the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team have now reached $19 million, and continue to pour in more than two months after 16 people died in a horrific bus crash on a Saskatchewan highway.

About $3.8 million has been raised during the seven weeks since an online fundraiser set up hours after the crash stopped accepting money, having collected $15.2 million, Broncos president Kevin Garinger said.

Sitting in the lobby of a downtown Saskatoon hotel on Wednesday, Garinger said some of that $3.8 million flowed directly to the team, while the remainder went into the new Humboldt-Strong Community Foundation.

Now, the team and its various legal advisers are tasked with distributing the money, a process few people know more intimately than former casino executive and current Las Vegas-based consultant Scott Nielson.

He chaired the committee tasked with disbursing the US$31.4-million Las Vegas Victims Fund, collected after the Oct. 1 mass shooting — which killed 58 people — and paid out to more than 530 victims beginning in March.

In an interview on Thursday, Nielson acknowledged he and others had to make hard choices — chief among them the exclusion of people who were physically uninjured but suffered emotional trauma. In the end, there was little pushback, he said.

“I thought people would say, ‘Well, I lost my wife, all I get is $275,000?’ We didn’t get that. We got emails back saying, ‘Thank you for helping us’ … We received feedback thanking us for what we were able to do,” he said.

“I think (the reason for that) is a number of different things. One is the transparency. The other is we always tried to make the point, and talked about it all the time, the fact that this is a gift that came in from people near and far.”

Sixteen people died and another 13 were injured when the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team’s bus collided with a semitrailer on April 6.

The crash led to what is thought to be the most successful online fundraising effort in Canadian history, a GoFundMe page that ultimately accepted more than 140,000 donations from people and corporations.

A tribute concert featuring several prominent Canadian country music performers raised an additional $428,000, which organizers split evenly between the families of all 29 people who were on the bus.

While some family members of victims have expressed differing views on how the GoFundMe dollars should be distributed, Garinger said he is relying on the same goodwill Nielson experienced as the fund moves through the courts.

“I’ve always believed in people. I believe in them even more because what I’ve witnessed, what I’ve lived through,” he said.

The team president told reporters last month he would apply to the Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan to oversee a process outlined in an untested piece of provincial legislation governing appeals for money.

The Informal Public Appeals Act became law in early 2015. It states that court approval is required to distribute a fundraising effort unless a disbursement scheme was established when the donations were made.

While that and other provisions theoretically apply to every such fundraising effort, a government spokesman confirmed this is the first time provincial officials are aware of a specific application for court oversight.

Kenneth Feinberg, a leading expert on disaster fundraising efforts, said transparency, speed and efficiency are the keys to his ideal process, which operates outside the court system.

Garinger said the team had good reason to opt for a court-guided distribution process.

“If somebody isn’t happy at the end of the day, they could appeal it to a higher court. We don’t anticipate that, but this allows for everything to be clean and really work effectively,” he said.