Federal government blasted for ‘shopping around courts’ on Indigenous child welfare
OTTAWA — Advocates fighting for First Nations children and families ripped apart by an underfunded child welfare system say the federal government should stop challenging a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order that awarded money to victims.
“If any of us did this to children in society, we wouldn’t be given permission to go around shopping around courts to see who would give us the best deal,” said Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, which filed the original complaint a dozen years ago.
“It’s about accepting responsibility as adults toward children and doing the right thing,” she said Tuesday.
Lawyers wrapped up arguments in a Federal Court Tuesday on Canada’s challenge to the tribunal’s recent ruling ordering Ottawa to pay $40,000 to every First Nations child who was inappropriately taken away from their parents after 2006.
Parents and grandparents whose kids and grandkids were taken from them and kids who were denied essential services were also to be given the same compensation.
The Sept. 6 ruling said the government “wilfully and recklessly” discriminated against Indigenous children living on reserve by not properly funding child and family services. As a result, children were sent away from their homes, families and reserves.
Had they lived off reserve, the children would be covered by better-funded provincial systems.
The government had its lawyers ask the Federal Court to stay the order, which imposed a Dec. 10 deadline for the government to come up with a plan on how it would provide payment to victims.
Federal Court Justice Paul Favel said Tuesday he will deliver a decision as soon as possible.
Justice Department lawyer Robert Frater said Canada agrees its actions were discriminatory. He also said the government would compensate children and their families — just not through the order from the tribunal, which he called an “unnecessarily invasive piece of surgery by the wrong doctors.”
The federal government instead wants the compensation to come through a settlement in a separate but related class-action lawsuit filed this year, which is seeking $6 billion in damages for Indigenous children.
That case could cover all victims going back to 1991, the government says.
The government’s lawyers argued in court that the tribunal decision’s compensation plan doesn’t allow for this because its order only includes victims and their families since 2006.