MP David Sweet joins call for inquiry into abuse at schools
David Sweet walks slowly down a snow-covered laneway cutting through the campus of what used to be St. Joseph’s Training School, a residential reform institution for boys deemed “delinquent” or “unmanageable” decades ago by the courts.
It’s early January and the Conservative MP for Flamborough-Glanbrook is walking a reporter and photographer through the site of the former school, located in the small town of Alfred, Ont., about 70 kilometres east of Ottawa. It was here that Sweet says he spent three “painful” years between the ages of 13 and 15 in the early 1970s, after being sent to the school for running away from his home in Kingston and stealing a few cars.
Sweet, the National Conservative Caucus Chair, is going public with his experiences at St. Joseph’s, he says, to lend his voice to a growing number of former training school students telling their stories of abuse. He is also calling for a public inquiry into that abuse.
Sweet decided to tell his story after a Toronto Star investigation revealed last month that the government has secretly settled more than 200 lawsuits alleging historic sexual, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and staff at provincially run secular training schools. The investigation also revealed that two provincial officials sounded alarms in the 1970s about the abuse, but that the province appeared to have ignored those warnings.
Sweet pauses and points at the top floor of the three-storey building that housed upwards of 150 boys at any one time between 1933 and the mid 1970s. St. Joseph’s was one of two reform schools for boys operated by Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic lay order, but funded by the provincial government. The site of St. Joseph’s is now a French-language college.
Sweet narrowly escaped a frightening encounter here with a Christian Brother who invited the then 13-yearold Sweet to his bedroom.
“I was conscious of something that wasn’t right then, but knowing what I know now, I realize just how fortunate I was to have refused his invitation,” said Sweet.
Those who would benefit most from a public inquiry are former abused students of as many as a dozen secular training schools, about which the provincial government has largely kept silent. People like Mary Ceretti of Hamilton, who was one of the first girls sent to Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville in the 1970s, and Sanford Cottrelle, who spent six years being shuffled through six training schools after being removed from his home on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia.
Like many former students, neither Ceretti, 56, nor Cottrelle, 56, have received any official acknowledgment of, or compensation for, the abuse they say they suffered at the hands of provincial government employees.
The Ministry of the Attorney General says there are “more appropriate ways” than a public inquiry to support survivors.
Lawyers who have represented training school abuse survivors believe there could be thousands of victims from the secular system alone.
“What happened at these training schools was not right,” said Ceretti, who alleges she was physically, sexually and emotionally abused for two years, including being forced to have an abortion. “It changed me. I’m an alcoholic, I don’t trust anybody. I don’t have any friends.”
“All they did was screw people up more,” said Cottrelle. “They called it a training school but they trained us to be assholes.”
Sweet wonders how much longer former abused students will have to wait for justice. “It’s time for the general public to know what happened,” he said. “Justice is long overdue.”
Early one evening in the summer of 1971, Sweet had been assigned to mop the dormitory where every night as many as 50 rambunctious boys between the ages of 12 and 16 were expected to say their prayers and sleep soundly. Few did.
Suddenly, in the doorway, André Charbonneau, a large hulk of a man known as Brother André or “The Horse,” due to his athletic prowess, appeared and called Sweet over.
Would the boy please come into his bedroom?
“By that time, I had heard stories about what Brother André did to other boys — the molestations, the beatings. I just knew in my gut it wasn’t the right thing, so I dropped the mop and took off,” said Sweet, now 60. “I think what saved me from not being summoned back was we were just then called for dinner.”
Sweet’s encounter was a close call. Others weren’t so lucky. More than 20 years later, following a police investigation into allegations of abuse at St. Joseph’s and another Catholic reform school, St. John’s Training School in Uxbridge, Ont., Charbonneau pleaded guilty to 17 charges, including sodomy of five victims, and indecent assault. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Charbonneau was one of 30 Christian Brothers at the schools who was charged criminally in the 1990s for their alleged abuse of students from the 1950s to the 1970s. More than two dozen were convicted.
In the mid-1990s, the archdioceses of Ottawa and Toronto, the Ontario government and the Ottawa-based Christian Brothers contributed to a $14-million compensation fund for about 1,000 former students. In 2004, then-premier Dalton McGuinty issued a public apology.
As for Sweet’s call for a public inquiry, Andrew Rudyk, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, said the government believes there are “more appropriate ways” to support survivors “given that public inquiries are meant to prevent future similar tragedies, and that the use of training schools ended in Ontario over three decades ago.”
Sweet says he chose not to participate in the St. Joseph’s and St. John’s compensation fund because others were more deserving. By his mid-20s, he had found Christianity and managed to pull his life together. He became an entrepreneur and raised five children with this wife, Almut. But the memories haunt him. Life was hard growing up poor in Kingston. Sweet’s father, Gordon, joined the Canadian Army at age 14, rising to the rank of sergeant before being discharged. His mother Jean struggled with mental health demons while trying to raise Sweet and his five siblings on her husband’s modest salary as a TV repairman.
Sweet was the third-youngest, and just never found school interesting or engaging. He would often act up. When he was 12, at a loss as to how to deal with his parents’ alcohol abuse and an unstable home life, he ran away and lived on the streets of Kingston for several months. When he was 13, he stole a few cars and went joyriding. When he was caught, a judge sent him to St. Joseph’s.
His arrival at the school was bewildering. Everything was in French and Sweet didn’t speak a word.
His brother, Paul, a year his junior, was already at the school but they were immediately separated when Sweet was moved from to the senior side because of his height and age. (Paul would remain at the school for six years.) The brothers would often see each other in the halls, but never had classes together.
Sweet describes life as hopeless, dreary and oppressive at a school where they were taught little about how to function as productive members of society.
(To this day, he refuses to refer to St. Joseph’s as a training school. “If it was a training school that would mean that you’d be taught something.”)
Fear permeated the boys’ lives. The smallest of transgressions — a wrong word, a step out of line — could be met with a host of humiliating punishments and often, violence. Slaps, punches and kicks were commonplace.
“There was never really any clear explanation of what you did wrong,” Sweet said. “By any standard, you were in a no-win situation.”
Once, Sweet was made to scrub walls with bleach for three hours using his bare hands after doing something — he can’t remember what — that displeased the brothers.
“The disdain of that stuck with me for about 20 years because of the pain in my hands and forearms,” he said.
Being tall for his age, and skinny, Sweet was a natural target for bullies. He became an expert in curling up in the fetal position to limit damage from kicks and punches, he says.
There were the ever-present whispers of sexual abuse. Sweet says some boys would talk of being touched inappropriately by some of the brothers.
“But what could we do? You learned quickly who to avoid,” he said.
The schools were established to “provide the boys or girls therein with a mental, moral, physical and vocational education, training and employment,” according to the 1950 version of the Act. Section 7 allowed a judge to send any boy or girl to a training school for a variety of reasons, including if the child is found “begging,” “wandering,” “destitute” or “proves unmanageable or incorrigible.”
Children who had committed all manner of crimes that would have resulted in jail time had they been adults were mixed in with those who had done little more than skip school or run away from home.
On the third floor of St. Joseph’s, Sweet takes a moment to compose himself before leading a reporter and photographer to a hallway, now walled up, where the school’s solitary confinement cells once stood. Sweet did three stints here. Students would be locked in the four-by-six foot rooms with just a steel bed and a toilet. They would be let out to brush their teeth for a few minutes every day but for no more than that, he says.
Sweet once spent 10 days in solitary following an escape attempt. It was around Easter 1972 and Sweet, then about 15, had reached a low point.
“It was just misery. I was getting beaten up. I had no hope of getting out of there. I felt like my life was just bleeding away,” he said.
One evening, he convinced a guard that he had been asked by a priest to help with an Easter service. The guard gave him a pass that would allow Sweet to access a part of the building where he knew one door was always kept open.
Sweet and a couple of others took off across a field and followed the railway tracks west for about 10 kilometres before being picked up by the OPP, handcuffed and sent back.
They were immediately thrown into solitary, though later that night, the boys were stripped down to their underwear and made to run around in the outdoor courtyard for what felt like hours.
On the other occasions he was sent to solitary, Sweet was actually grateful because it meant he didn’t have to worry about getting beaten up. “I’m a glass half-full guy.”
Sweet was also motivated to tell his story by the suicide of his 23-year-old daughter, Lara, who died of a drug overdose on Aug. 11, 2017, in an Oshawa rooming house. Lara had struggled with addiction and mental health issues all her life, but in recent years seemed to be turning her life around.
“So I am speaking out for those people,” said Sweet.