Wednesday October 27, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 27, 2021

That’s enough, Jean Chrétien

The former Indian Affairs Minister has had decades to ponder his failings. It’s not clear he even understands what the residential schools were.

“This problem was never mentioned when I was minister. Never.”

This was Jean Chrétien’s response on Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle Sunday night when asked about the abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools when he was minister of Indian Affairs from 1968 to 1974. It might even be true: Maybe none of his underlings bothered telling him. Alas, that can’t save 87-year-old Teflon Jean this time. If he didn’t know it, he bloody well should have.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report records that in 1970, Jacques Serre, a child-care worker at the Anglican residential school in La Tuque, Que., advised Chrétien’s Indian Affairs ministry in writing that another employee had “taken liberties (with a student) in the presence of a third party.” The ministry asked its Quebec director to look into it, but no one even bothered tracking down the alleged victim, who had left the school.

A year later the La Tuque school’s administrator, Jean Bonnard, called the gendarmes over his suspicions that another child-care worker was conducting “certain ‘activities’ of a sexual nature” with his charges. Bonnard duly informed Indian Affairs of this. The police interviewed four boys, concluding the behaviour had “been going on for some time,” and then nothing happened.

Not only was the La Tuque school Chrétien’s responsibility as minister of Indian Affairs. It was in his riding.

In the early 1970s, Chrétien’s ministry received at least four complaints from the Catholic St. Anne’s residential school in Fort Albany, Ont., including of physical assault and of at least one teacher keeping “guns and live ammunition in class to scare the students.” This week, NDP MP Charlie Angus produced a letter from a teacher at St. Anne’s addressed directly to Chrétien, complaining of a “prejudicial attitude” among staff members to the Indigenous people of the community.

The Truth and Reconciliation report records the case of Harry Joseph, an employee at the Anglican residential school in Alert Bay, B.C., who in 1970 pleaded guilty to indecent assault after having been fired for having “interfered with two other girls by removing (their) bed covers and fondling them.”

Perhaps this news never made it down the telegraph to Ottawa. But it was the ministry itself that cashiered child-care worker Claude Frappier from his position at the Catholic residential school in Whitehorse in 1970 — though it didn’t bother informing the victims’ parents or the police. (Frappier was belatedly convicted in 1990 on 13 counts of sexual assault on boys aged eight to 11.)

The Truth and Reconciliation report records the case of Harry Joseph, an employee at the Anglican residential school in Alert Bay, B.C., who in 1970 pleaded guilty to indecent assault after having been fired for having “interfered with two other girls by removing (their) bed covers and fondling them.”

Perhaps this news never made it down the telegraph to Ottawa. But it was the ministry itself that cashiered child-care worker Claude Frappier from his position at the Catholic residential school in Whitehorse in 1970 — though it didn’t bother informing the victims’ parents or the police. (Frappier was belatedly convicted in 1990 on 13 counts of sexual assault on boys aged eight to 11.) (Continued: The National Post)