Canada to pay millions over forced adoptions

Indigenous people brought lawsuits against program

OTTAWA, Ontario — The Canadian government said Friday that it will pay 750 million Canadian dollars to settle lawsuits brought by indigenous people who, beginning in the mid-1960s and for two decades afterward, were taken from their communities by child welfare workers and sent to nonnative foster families or adopted by white families.

Many of the children ended up in the United States and some even as far away as Europe and New Zealand. It is unclear how many children were affected; estimates range up to 30,000.

The settlement does not fully resolve all claims related to the government’s adoption program but it is a step in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ambitious, if not fulfilled, program to right past injustices against indigenous people in Canada.

Chief Marcia Brown Martel of the Beaverhouse First Nation near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, the lead plaintiff in a class action that was one of the cases settled Friday, said she hoped the settlement would lead to further reforms of child welfare systems.

“I have great hope that because we’ve reached this plateau, this will never, ever happen in Canada again,” Brown Martel said.

In 1967 or 1968, when she was 4 or 5 years old, Brown Martel and her sister were placed in foster care by child welfare workers.

She was repeatedly taken away from her reserve, perhaps 10 times, until 1972, when she was adopted by a nonindigeneous family.

The adoption program first came under severe criticism in a Manitoba government report in 1985. Two years ago, Manitoba became the first province to apologize for its role in the program.

A class action in Ontario saying the government failed to fulfill its obligations to indigenous people in the program dragged on for eight years before being decided in the plaintiffs’ favor in February.

If approved by the court, the settlement announced Friday will resolve that case and some others. The government is negotiating with plaintiffs in other cases, which unlike the Ontario case also involve provinces and include accusations that the plaintiffs were abused by foster or adoptive families.

The government is also working out the amounts for individual settlements and the wording of an official apology. The settlement announced Friday will include 50 million Canadian dollars for a foundation to educate adoptees about their native languages and cultures.

In an earlier ruling in the case, Justice Edward P. Belobaba of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice called the adoption program “well intentioned but profoundly uninformed” and found that it had a profound effect on the children throughout their lives.