HIS HOME AND NATIVE LAND

A Métis man taken from his family as a child and adopted by American parents is seeking to serve a prison sentence in Canada.

A Métis man taken from his family as a child and adopted by American parents has gone to court to force Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to let him serve the rest of a 149-year prison sentence in Canada.

A lawyer acting for Scott Meyers filed the legal challenge in Ottawa on Thursday seeking a court order to overturn Toews’ refusal to approve a transfer to a prison in his country of birth. Meyers, 39, has served 17 years of his sentence for armed robbery and attempted second-degree murder in U.S. prisons.

He was born Wilfred Sutherland to Métis parents in Winnipegosis, Man. When he was a small child, he and six siblings were taken from their home by the provincial child and family services amid allegations their parents were drinking.

He was later adopted by a couple in New Orleans as part of the so-called “Sixties Scoop,” a Canadian program of forced assimilation of aboriginal children with white families that ran from the 1960s into the late 1980s.

The adoption by a white couple, says his Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed, could have been a factor in the troubled life that ended with Meyers’ conviction in 1994.

The same year as the crime, Hameed said, the 20-year-old Meyers had just found out about his birth family and initiated contact.

Meyers and two other men were charged after a party at the home of an acquaintance’s parents. After they robbed the home, Meyers repeatedly stabbed the man in the back of the head, according to one of the other men who testified against him.

Meyers maintains that he did not participate in the assault. He is serving his sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Last year, Meyers applied for the transfer back to Canada under the International Transfer of Offenders Act. Hameed says Meyers is eligible to apply because his Canadian citizenship was never vacated.

In late December, Meyers learned that Toews had rejected his application. According to the statement filed in Federal Court this week, Toews had denied the request because of the seriousness of the crime and the premise that Meyers had abandoned Canada as his place of residence.

Hameed wrote that it was “an abomination” for Toews to claim Meyers abandoned Canada. “The Minister knew that the Applicant’s uprooting from his place of birth in Manitoba was done without his consent and that the Crown was directly responsible for the separation of the Applicant from his birth family, the erosion of his cultural heritage and the removal of the Applicant from Canada.”

“For privacy reasons, we cannot comment on specific cases,” Toews’ director of communications, Julie Carmichael, wrote in an email.