‘WE CAN MOVE FORWARD’
Sixties Scoop survivor Maggie-Blue Waters says approval of an $800M settlement will let people heal. But not All survivors Are pleased.
After two days of hearings in Saskatoon, a judge has approved the $800-million settlement offer for Sixties Scoop survivors.
Federal judge Michel Shore said he spent a year reading and analyzing documents related to the settlement and gave a lot of thought to the submissions at the hearings on Thursday and Friday, before announcing his approval Friday afternoon.
Survivor Maggie-Blue Waters, the named plaintiff in the Sixties Scoop class-action lawsuit from Saskatchewan, said she was pleased with the decision and said she felt the judge had heard the people who spoke at the hearings.
“That means they heard us. That means they heard our voices. That means all of the suffering, all of the work, is for the good,” she said. “We can move forward. We can heal. Our ancestors are happy.”
She said, however, the hearings process was just the beginning for many survivors.
“I’m understanding the tension, and I have great compassion for my fellow survivors that are feeling anger, frustration and anxiety,” she said. “For many of them, this is their very first time to speak to this.”
Not everyone was pleased. Anna McArthur Parent, a board member with Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Saskatchewan, said the settlement is being pushed through too quickly.
“As a matter of fact, through the judge’s actions, throughout all day yesterday and this morning, we could tell that he was not an unbiased judge He already had made his mind up and this was a done deal before the settlement hearings.”
Some people don’t even know if the Sixties Scoop applies to them, or how to find out, McArthur Parent said.
“Time should have been spent to give an explanation and a full understanding of what the Sixties Scoop is really about, and whether or not they qualify or don’t qualify, and to find out whether or not their best interest is to support this or not. We don’t have time to do that,” she said.
Peter Van Name, a Sixties Scoop survivor who was taken away from his parents at birth and adopted into a home in New Jersey, said his concern is that Indigenous children are still being taken from their families today — and he would give any settlement money up to actually have children returned to their families.
“Every city’s got a child welfare program where they actually go and take kids today. They probably apprehended more children today,” he said. “It keeps on going. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps on going, intergenerational, from Indian residential schools to us and now our kids.”
The second day of the hearings focused mostly on the $75 million in legal fees that were negotiated alongside the $800-million settlement offer. Survivors and advocates in attendance listened to lawyers argue for and against the legal fee payout for more than three hours on Friday morning.
Shore began the day’s proceedings by speaking directly to the audience and thanking the survivors for coming forward to object.
“What hurts a human being who is a judge also is that stories have to be told in their entirety, not in three minutes, and that’s understandable,” Shore said, referencing the three-minute time limit given to each objector.
Shore and some of the lawyers present implied during the hearings that it could take a long time for another agreement to be reached if the offer fell through.
British Columbia lawyer David Klein suggested in the proceedings that payouts to eligible claimants could occur as quickly as next year if the settlement went through.
“My expectation, a realistic expectation, is that cheques would probably flow toward the end of the summer, sometime in the fall of 2019,” Klein told Shore.