Ottawa must apologize for ’Sixties Scoop’ and pay up

This first appeared in the Toronto Star: As Canada began to phase out compulsory Indian residential schools in the 1950s, it found a new way to pursue its longstanding policy of forced assimilation. Over two decades starting in the early 1960s, thousands of First Nations children were taken from their families, often without consent, and placed in non-indigenous care. To ensure the children would never return to their First Nations communities, death certificates were issued expunging any record of their aboriginal existence.

The so-called “Sixties Scoop” has received much less attention than residential schools – until quite recently it was a well-kept secret – but it, too, has left a shameful legacy of “intergenerational scars and cultural loss,” as Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger said last year.

Yet, despite Ottawa’s shifting rhetoric on indigenous issues, the federal government has been remarkably slow to acknowledge its failure and compensate its many victims. Worse still, Ottawa continues to fight a series of class-action lawsuits filed in recent years by survivors.

The plaintiffs in the first such suit, filed in Ontario in 2009 on behalf of some 16,000 indigenous individuals, will finally have their day in court on Tuesday, after numerous failed attempts by Ottawa to have the case thrown out. The Trudeau government, which has promised “a renewed relationship between the federal government and indigenous peoples built on trust, recognition and respect for rights,” should stop contesting the suit, apologize for the Sixties Scoop and compensate survivors.

After all, Ottawa had a fiduciary responsibility to protect those children who were forcibly taken from their parents and deprived of their cultural heritage. Many experienced direct racism and abuse. Instead, in the case of Ontario, the federal government signed an agreement that allowed the forced adoptions to proceed from Dec. 1965 to Dec. 1984.

The suit claims that the government of Canada breached its constitutional duty to protect aboriginal children, allowed provincial child welfare officials to extinguish their rights under the Indian Act, failed to provide services to which they were entitled and encouraged a policy of cultural assimilation.

The representative plaintiff in the case, Marcia Brown Martel, was taken from her family at the age of 4. Social workers told her parents, who lived in the Beaverhouse First Nation near Kirkland Lake, Ont., that she was mentally handicapped and that she would fare better with a non-indigenous family. Initially she was placed in a series of foster homes before being adopted at the age of 9. Nine years later her relationship with her adoptive mother broke down and she returned to Beaverhouse, where she later became chief. She no longer speaks her native language.

Brown Martel’s mission isn’t about money, she insists. It’s about ensuring no aboriginal child will ever have to go through what she endured.

Ottawa should want that, too, of course. Yet government lawyers continue to argue the “Sixties Scoop” was a product of a different era when policy-makers genuinely believed that adopting out aboriginal children to white families improved their chances of escaping poverty, getting a good education and settling into a productive middle-class life.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett hinted last week that she is open to finding a solution outside the courts. She should move quickly to do just that.