“We are concerned that the lack of co-operation, delays and looming deadline stand in the way of creating the historical record of Indian residential schools as it was originally intended,” auditor general Michael Ferguson said at a news conference Tuesday after tabling his spring report in the House of Commons.
The five-year mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission includes creating a historical record of the residential school system that removed about 150,000 native children from their homes and placed them in church-run schools, where thousands were subject to physical, mental and sexual abuse.
The federal government was required to provide all relevant documents from its archives to the Commission, an obligation supported by an Ontario court decision in January.
Library and Archives Canada estimated relevant documents could stretch for 20 kilometres and would take about $40 million and a decade to retrieve and digitize them all.
Time and money are not the only obstacles getting in the way of creating the record by the time the Commission wraps up its work in July 2014.
The auditor general found there has been no agreement between the Commission and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, tasked with co-ordinating the collection of documents from federal government departments, over the meaning of the phrase “relevant documents.”
The aboriginal affairs department eventually decided to come up with its own definition, with the Commission agreeing to work with that so long as it could ask for additional documents if it thought anything was missing.
Ferguson criticized this approach.
“(If) the Commission comes back and says we think there is more that’s relevant, does that mean that work all has to be done again?” Ferguson told reporters.
There was also no agreement on the quality of digitized documents, with the aboriginal affairs department sending the Commission thousands of pages it had already scanned to deal with abuse settlement claims to be used for the historical record, even though they were aware the quality of some of the images was below par.
The report also found the aboriginal affairs department skimped on the descriptions accompanying the documents, providing fewer details than it did for records related to litigation.
“This was done to save time and money,” the report says.
Money has also been an issue.
The Commission set aside $6 million over two years for the collection of documents without analyzing how much it would actually cost and the federal government told the Commission it would have to pay for the scanning of documents.
Ferguson said there is much blame to go around, but argued that, given the federal government has access to more resources, it probably should have shown more initiative.
“I think there definitely were some places where the government departments needed to step up a little bit more to try to help lead this towards reconciliation, but that’s not to say that the Commission has managed everything perfectly either,” Ferguson said Tuesday.
Both the Commission and the aboriginal affairs department agreed with the recommendations, with the Commission expressing hope that it will not have to return to court to deal with the remaining obstacles of time and money.
“We are working jointly with the Commission to develop a project plan to fulfil document disclosure requirements,” Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said in a statement Tuesday.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Joanna Smith
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