Was Canada's First Aboriginal Justice Minister Kept in the Dark on Residential Schools and the Catholic Church?


CBC News reported this morning that, just six days after Jody Wilson Raybould was sworn in as justice minister, the federal government abandoned an appeal of a decision that took the Roman Catholic church off the hook for the residential school fiasco.


No one in the federal government is saying who made the final decision to relieve the Catholic Church of its financial responsibilities to residential school survivors.

But a source with direct knowledge of the controversial 2015 case told CBC News that then-minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't consulted, even though a lawyer in her department signed the final release.

"This is stunning. It's just unbelievable that the first Indigenous minister of justice was frozen out of a decision like this," said Tom McMahon, a former general legal counsel for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission who also spent 17 years as a lawyer in the Department of Justice.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, said she was also alarmed to hear that Wilson-Raybould was left out of the loop.

"This was a critical file on one of the most important issues facing the country," said Turpel-Lafond, a former Saskatchewan provincial court judge and member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.

"Why didn't they consult her? Were they worried she'd have a different opinion?"

So far nobody's talking. 

The Harper government reportedly filed an appeal in August, 2015, of a decision to take the RC church off the hook.  The Liberal government abandoned that appeal six days after JWR became justice minister.

On Aug. 14, 2015, the [Harper] government filed an appeal. In a four-page document, provided this week to CBC News by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, a senior lawyer for the Department of Justice cited several reasons to dispute Gabrielson's ruling.

The document says Gabrielson erred in assuming a deal had been reached, erred in assuming the federal lawyer on the file had the authority to approve the deal, and had made "palpable and overriding errors in his assessment of the facts." The federal government asked that the July decision to be cancelled or "quashed."

That fall, Justin Trudeau's Liberals won a majority government. On Nov. 4, 2015, Prime Minister Trudeau's first cabinet was sworn in. We Wai Kai Nation member and former Crown prosecutor Jody Wilson-Raybould was appointed Canada's first Indigenous minister of justice.

Former clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, said it might not have been brought to JWR's attention "because it wasn't seen as significant enough."

Turpel-Lafond said survivors deserve answers.

"It doesn't add up. It doesn't add up legally. It doesn't add up politically. Why did the federal government let them off the hook? Did the receptionist make the decision?" she said.

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