Sisters want posthumous compensation
Brother missed deadline for boarding school abuse settlement
Eight months after a class-action suit was settled on behalf of former students at the Montreal Institute for the Deaf, a total of 195 victims have come forward to tell their stories of repeated sexual assault at the hands of the Clercs de Saint-Viateur, the religious order that ran the boarding school.
The men, many of them now in their 70s and 80s, named a total of 33 priests and religious staff as well as five lay people who preyed on them over a period of more than four decades — from 1940 to 1982.
But one victim, who died in 2014 at the age of 84, was not counted among them, and now his sisters have been told it’s too late for them to apply for compensation. The deadline was Sept. 2, 2016. “My (brother’s) life was destroyed because of them,” said Dana (not her real name), who now lives in northwestern Ontario, but grew up in New Brunswick with the rest of the family — 18 children in all. The family’s names are being withheld so as to protect the identity of the victims. Another of Dana’s brothers was also at the Institute, and his claim against the Clercs de Saint-Viateur has been accepted.
“He’d come home from school for the summer holidays, and my mother would have to fix him up (physically), but every September my parents would send him back. He must have thought Mom and Dad hated him.”
The lawsuit does allow for the families of deceased victims to receive compensation — half of what the victim would receive if he was still alive.
The record $30-million settlement — the largest in Quebec history for sexual abuse — reflects the severity of the abuse at the school in Villeray, and the vulnerability of the students.
Boys as young as seven were molested by staff, from teachers to cafeteria workers. Being deaf-mute, however, the boys could not call for help. When some of them did report the abuse to parents, they were not believed.
When they were children, John told his sister Alice about the abuse (not their real names), who is also deaf, while on the train home to New Brunswick for the summer holidays.
For four years, starting at the age of 13, John was assaulted every week by two of the brothers at the institute.
But John told Alice, now 78, not to tell their parents — he was afraid he wouldn’t be believed, and that the priests would take vengeance on him, Alice said through an interpreter.
Robert Kugler, with law firm Kugler, Kandestin, who has represented the victims since the lawsuit was launched in 2010, was sympathetic to the family’s situation. But he said the Sept. 2 deadline was strict.
“I’m so upset to hear this, I wanted everyone who was victimized to have a right to get paid,” said Kugler. “But the deadline was imposed by the court.”
The only recourse for the sisters is to appeal directly to Superior Court Judge Eva Petras, to extend the deadline, Kugler said. But it would be a hard case to make — any new claim would diminish the amount of the existing claims, he said.
(The money will be disbursed according to the severity of the abuse, but if it was divided equally, each victim would receive almost $154,000.)
Dana believes the other victims would not begrudge them.
“It’s not right (to refuse the claim),” Dana said, adding she found out about the deadline a week after it had passed, on Sept. 9. “(John) was one of the victims and he got it bad. I know the other victims would not care about the extra $700 or $800 (they would lose). They waited 40, 50 or 60 years to get this money.”
In a claim form for compensation filled out by Alice on Oct. 14, she wrote that Brother Yves Laberge — who was also named by at least five other victims — would come for John during the night.
“When (John) would say he was tired, the priest would take him by the neck and choke him, bringing him into a room in the basement to sodomize him ... (John’s) rectum was torn and he was in a lot of pain. Nothing stopped Brother Laberge.”
Alice also named another priest — Brother Hervé Neveu — who is not on the victims’ list of abusers, alleging he would also assault him regularly.
Laberge went on to work in Haiti for 15 years. He died in Outremont in 2012, at the age of 89; Neveu continued working at the Villeray school then at the Centre 7400 that replaced it until 2007. He died in 2014 at the age of 97.
Asked to describe how the assaults affected the victim, Alice wrote that the abuse affected the whole family. John, who left the school at 17, went to live with one of his sisters and sexually abused her son when he was a child.
“He was so perturbed, he didn’t know right from wrong. His life became a life of debauchery, and he worked his whole life for little pay. A wasted life — he couldn’t learn to read or write, his head would not obey. He died a miserable man.”
Both Dana and Alice said if they got the money on John’s behalf — likely about $75,000 — part of it would go to the nephew who was abused, to seek therapy himself.
I’m so upset to hear this, I wanted everyone who was victimized to have a right to get paid. But the deadline was imposed by the court.