CANADA
Toronto Star
By JESSE WINTER
Staff Reporter
Fri., April 7, 2017
Under threat of a lawsuit, the federal government has started releasing thousands of long-sought internal documents that could explain why it withheld police records of horrific abuse from survivors of the notorious St. Anne’s residential school.
Survivors of the school in Fort Albany, Ont., say they were the victims of appalling treatment including sexual abuse, being shocked by an electrified chair and being forced to eat their own vomit.
The Ontario Provincial Police investigated the abuses in the 1990s, conducting interviews with more than 700 survivors and creating thousands of records about the abuse. Five former employees at the church-run school were convicted.
But when survivors of the school — like one woman referred to in court documents as K-10106 — applied for compensation under the residential school’s settlement process, those critical police records were withheld even though the government was duty-bound to provide them.
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