CANADA
Toronto Star
By JESSE WINTER
Staff Reporter
Wed., April 12, 2017
The federal government is continuing to obstruct justice for the survivors of St. Anne’s residential school by “thumbing their nose” at the information commissioner and releasing 1,200 pages of almost entirely blacked-out documents, NDP MP Charlie Angus says.
Last week the justice department sent Angus’s office the first batch of some 70,000 pages of emails, speaking notes and memos related to the notorious residential school as part of an ongoing access to information request. The disclosure came after the federal information commissioner threatened to sue the government for originally refusing to disclose the documents.
But of those 1,200 pages, all but a handful have been stripped of any information beyond email addresses and the occasional emoji.
“This is clearly them thumbing their nose at the access to information law and the information commissioner who already threatened to take them to court,” Angus said.
Angus hopes the emails he is after will shed light on how and why the justice department decided not to disclose thousands of pages of police records detailing horrific abuse at St. Anne’s during the residential school claims process for survivors of the church-run school.
Neither the justice department nor Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s office returned the Star’s requests for comment.
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