Law firm seeks to launch class action suit over residential schools
By Tim Kalinowski on July 9, 2021.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDtkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com The Guardian Law Group is seeking to launch a class action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of Indigenous families who lost loved ones at residential schools.“There has already been a class action regarding Indian Residential Schools,” explains Guardian Law attorney Mathew Farrell. “That claim was about survivors. This claim is about those that died. The claim is for the families of these children. They were not told of those deaths, there was no transparency about how they died, and if they tried to inquire then they were cowed, brow-beaten into silence by an institution they had feared since they themselves were children.”
Despite these revelations of children buried at residential schools in unmarked graves coming out during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings between 2008 and 2015, Farrell says recent discoveries of hundreds of graves at several former residential schools has added impetus to launching the class action at this time.
“Until these bodies were found nobody really took these allegations seriously, and nobody was listening to people,” he says. “In a lot of instances individuals didn’t even know definitively those family members had likely died. Often they were told ‘they ran away.’ Or ‘we don’t know where they are.’ This (recent revelation) has kind of pulled the bandage off the wound.
“It is a shame action with respect to this wasn’t taken sooner,” Farrell states, “but I think in a lot of ways this is something that has just come out at this point.”
Farrell was also asked why the federal government was the correct target of the lawsuit given many of the residential schools in question were run by religious orders who have, in many cases, failed to disclose the records as to how and when these children died to their families?
Farrell agrees there is more than enough blame to go around, but cites the previous class action which the federal government settled with residential school survivors which obligated it to disclose these records.
“The government has had years to provide records of who went to these schools, and what happened to them,” Farrell says. “And they were obliged to do that under the previous settlement. That hasn’t happened, and it is becoming clear that we will never know how many of these children died wrongfully. It is true, in many cases, it was a member of a church who did the wrongful act, and there was abuse, and many of those abuses happened at the hands of members of the clergy– we know those abuses occurred.
“So this claim is about justice for the families of the children that died from that abuse,” he acknowlegdes, “but it is also about the cover-up. The government was the one who was supposed to be collecting these records and making sure that these people were informed. And the government has tried to bury the evidence of a cultural genocide beneath the bodies of children.”
Those wishing more information about this class action lawsuit can call Guardian Law Group at 403-457-7778 or visit the firm’s website at http://www.guardian.law. Follow @TimKalHerald on Twitter 4
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