Abuse-claim documents should be destroyed: adjudicator
Canada risks ‘privacy disaster’ for residential school victims
Evidence given by residential school abuse survivors in closed-door hearings should never see the light of day, the lawyer in charge of abuse settlement process says.
Dan Shapiro, chief adjudicator of the Independent Assessment Process, says Canada will be courting a potential “privacy disaster” if it doesn’t destroy the 800,000 audio recordings, transcripts and other documents associated with 38,000 claims of sexual abuse, physical abuse and other heinous acts.
Destruction is the only way to show “proper respect” to aboriginal Canadians who were abused and victimized at Canada’s residential schools, Shapiro said Thursday, following a presentation at the University of Alberta’s access and privacy conference.
“The records contain some of the most intimate, private information,” Shapiro said. “Even the perception that their information will be made public can cause great harm emotionally and revictimize those individuals and create ripple effects in their communities.”
The IAP was mandated as part of a 2007 settlement agreement for 150,000 students who attended 139 federal-funded, church-run schools between the 1870s and 1996. All students who attended the schools were eligible for a Common Experience Payment, but the IAP was created to handle specific cases of abuse.
Documents gathered for IAP hearings include income tax, education, corrections and medical records. There are transcripts by victims and alleged perpetrators. Some divulge identities of other claimants, witnesses and perpetrators. The question of what would happen with the documents “wasn’t as clear as it should have been” when the settlement was negotiated, Shapiro said.
As of last month, 28,000 IAP cases had been resolved, resulting in more than $2.4 billion in compensation payments, with roughly 10 per cent resulting in no settlements. The final hearings are expected to take place in spring 2016, with final decisions issued by early 2018.
As the largest legal settlement in Canadian history draws to a close, a tug of war has begun between privacy and posterity. Arguments on the fate of the documents will be heard July 14 to 16 at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto.
As chief defendant, the federal government is expected to argue that it owns the documents, which could be kept at the national archives and released 20 years after a victim’s death. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, mandated by the settlement to tell the story of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools without naming perpetrators, will ask that the documents be given to the new National Research Centre at the University of Winnipeg.
The Assembly of First Nations and several residential school survivors will argue for destruction of the documents. Shapiro will argue that church and government records for IAP hearings should also be destroyed.
“In our view, there was a promise of confidentiality made in that agreement, and that promise must be kept,” Shapiro said. “These ripple effects continue throughout the generations, whether the documents are sealed for 20 years or 50 years or 100 years, it risks revictimizing these folks and their descendants.”
Ry Moran, the head of the National Research Centre, said confidentiality of victims was also the major concern of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC gathered roughly 7,000 statements — some of them confidential — but will also pass on millions of government and church documents full of sensitive information. While the centre will continue to tell the story, Moran said the centre is hoping for direction on how to handle more sensitive information.
If the IAP statements are destroyed, much of the residential school history will be lost forever. Because of the trauma involved in the telling, many IAP applicants weren’t able to tell their stories during TRC hearings, said Moran.
“That’s five, almost six times the number of statements (than the number gathered by the TRC),” said Ry Moran. “When you have that amount of oral history, that amount of information on the true nature of the abuses, I think it’s fair to question what destruction of that information would mean.”