Trust. Integrity. Reputation.
Trust. Integrity. Reputation.
Top News - September - 2005
Volume 23 - Number 6
AFN launches class action lawsuit
Missing women No body, no investigation
Honors for AMMSA publisher
A bit of legal advice - Editorial
Books of wisdom and knowledge for Qallunaat- Guest ColumnCheck out Ontario Birchbark
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AFN launches class action lawsuit
Paul Barnsley, Windspeaker Staff Writer, Ottawa
National Chief Phil Fontaine called a press conference on Aug. 4 to announce the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) would launch a class action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of residential school survivors.
The statement of claim was filed with the Ontario and Alberta courts the next day.
AFN sources say the announcement came just days after a letter was received from the ministry of Justice stating there would be no guarantee the AFN would play a central role in the implementation of the federal government's compensation plan for school survivors, no matter what it may have said in the political accord signed by the national chief and Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan in May.
There was no mention of that letter during the press conference. Sources close to the Fontaine administration say the national chief does not believe it is in the best interests of survivors to take on the government directly in public. The national chief passed up several opportunities to criticize the government. Instead, he repeated a few key talking points throughout the press conference.
"We have filed a class action suit because we want to secure a place at the table," Fontaine said. "We want to establish some certainty in the process, that the views of the Assembly of First Nations will be considered as an essential matter in whatever agreement is concluded."
It appears, based on the number of times the national chief mentioned the need to "secure a place at the table" and that the AFN's views must be considered "essential" or "central," that there might be some doubts as to whether that's what will happen. But when questioned about this, he stayed away from suggesting he anticipated trouble.
He was asked if the lawsuit shouldn't be interpreted as a sign there's a lack of trust in the federal government.
"No," he replied. "This is really about ensuring that higher degree of certainty that commitments that were made are considered in the same light that we are considering them."
Fontaine admitted the AFN did not have rock solid, unquestioned status as a stakeholder in the current negotiation process that will lead to an eventual compensation plan. He said the lawsuit was designed to remedy that.
"We want to go beyond consultation. We actually want to be engaged in the negotiations around all of the elements around this issue. We're not convinced that our place at the table is as secure as other interests at the table and we felt that we had to do this," he said.
The national chief said the AFN lawsuit would be seeking $12 billion. The people making up the class include all living survivors and all First Nation community members. Fontaine, who will be one of the representative plaintiffs in the action, estimated that would involve close to 750,000 people.
"We're taking about the people I represent, First Nations' people, as well as other Aboriginal people we wish to invite to this process," he said.
While there has often been controversy about just how representative the AFN is- some say that it is only the lobbying presence in Ottawa for the more than 600 chiefs across the country who represent the true First Nation governments-Fontaine claimed he represents all First Nations people.
"We negotiated the agreement with the federal government. By 'we' I mean the Assembly of First Nations. There are a number of significant commitments in the political agreement and we believe that those commitments will be honored by the federal government," he said. "As you know, they're represented in this process by Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci. The Assembly of First Nations is not the only party at the table. There are other interests represented at the table. We are the only party that represents government. The political agreement that was concluded on May 30 was government to government. The Assembly of First Nations representing First Nations governments and the federal government."
One might have expected the legal community to be angry about the AFN lawsuit, which could be seen as an intrusion into their jurisdiction. But Calgary lawyer Vaughn Marshall, who said he was speaking on behalf of his clients-620 claimants from the Blood and Peigan reserves- and not as an official spokesman for the consortium of lawyers involved in the Baxter class action, criticized the AFN decision to litigate based on the idea that it represented the interests of chiefs rather than all First Nation citizens. Marshall has been involved in residential school litigation since 1997. He is also involved in the Baxter class action. He said his clients just don't see the AFN as their representative.
"The AFN is not and has never been the representative of grassroots Aboriginal people in this country. The AFN is a lobby group that represents the interests of band leaders, not the voices of ordinary Aboriginal people," Vaughn Marshall said in an unsolicited e-mail message to this publication.
Marshall said the AFN "wants to butt in to the court system at the last minute and apparently exploit the work of the lawyers and the decades of work they have collectively put into the residential school lawsuits.
"The AFN seems to want to play the central role in resolving the legal cases with the federal government, yet, ironically, the AFN looks to this very same government to provide it with the funding it needs to exist," he added.
The lawyer said the newly filed class action is likely to cause problems, not create solutions, and "will directly interfere with what the grassroots Aboriginal victims want most, prompt settlement.
The class action is disruptive and is unlikely to be approved by the court, and the AFN's proceeding with its class action in the face of these obstacles will surely cause serious delay, exactly what the grassroots victims do not want."
He argued that the survivors do not want their compensation money diverted in any way to programs or administration.
"The money must go directly to survivors and not be diverted into the funding of programs-programs that are likely to never benefit the victims who were abused in the boarding schools. Every dollar in settlement monies that goes towards funding a program means less money for the victims who are entitled to being directly paid money damages for the abuse they suffered in these schools," he said.
The objections of lawyers, who in some cases stand to make up to 40 per cent of any final court settlement, will be scrutinized with some suspicion. But individual survivors have repeatedly told the national chief he doesn't speak for them.
"I'm saying that they don't represent me," said Ray Mason.
Mason lives on the Peguis territory in Manitoba. He is chairman of Spirit Wind, a Manitoba organization of residential school survivors. He is also on the board of the national survivors' organization. As a member of the two groups, he said he is line for two meetings with the federal government's representative over the next few weeks.
Mason said Frank Iacobucci "has sent us a letter of acknowledgement and he looks forward to meeting with us and discussing various options of what we thought the compensation should be."
The numbers put forward by the AFN will not be what the survivors put forward at those meetings.
"We're not in total agreement with the 10 and three [$10,000 lump sum, plus $3,000 per year in the schools] because each claim is different. A lot of our Elders here in Manitoba are extremely upset with the 10 and three. That's simply because there were no grassroots people having any input in the process," Mason said.
He called the AFN proposal "the absolute lowest it should get."
"What we're recommending is a formula of $25,000 [lump sum payment] plus $10,000 [for each year in the schools]. We think Iacobucci should work between those two numbers," he added.
Mason said he doesn't trust the deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan. He pointed out that she vehemently supported the government's alternative dispute resolution process before the standing committee on Aboriginal Affairs and said the government had no plans to change tactics just weeks before she announced the deal with the AFN to do just that.
"I never did have any faith in Ms. McLellan because of the remarks she made at the standing committee," said Mason.
And he strongly agrees with Marshall that there is a serious disconnect between the First Nation leadership and the grassroots people.
"I totally agree with that because, if anything, AFN should be reaching out and calling for participation from the grassroots people and they're not doing that. It seems like they want to take over the process because there's money there all of a sudden," he said.
Mason's point of view is not the only one. Another national survivor's group board member, former chief Ted Quewezance, said the AFN class action gives survivors one more option and that's a good thing. He said too many lawyers have amassed sizeable client lists and are not doing an adequate job of representing the survivors.
With all the questions about who speaks for First Nations and what the status of the AFN is in these crucial negotiations, Windspeaker sent a long list of questions to Anne McLellan's office seeking to get clarification on how the minister and her government view the AFN. None of the questions were dealt with directly.
"I think the government's commitments to the AFN to ensure they are at the centre of the process have been clear. In terms of what we have committed to do, it is in black and white in the documents released," said Alexander Swann, spokesman for McLellan.
Missing women No body, no investigation
Paul Barnsley, Windspeaker Staff Writer, Edmonton
It only took a couple of days for Danielle Boudreau and Bekkie Fugate to find Teri-lynn House once they started looking in early August.
House had been reported missing to the RCMP detachment in Devon, a small community just outside Edmonton, more than a month previously. Her mother, Melanie House, was concerned that her daughter, who has been fighting an addiction, had run away to Edmonton and ended up on the streets. Teri-lynn was eventually found safe in Cranbrook, B.C., but, given the fate of many other missing Native women, her safety was never a sure thing.
Boudreau, a 30-year-old Native woman who has beaten a cocaine addiction, became known to Windspeaker in 2001. She had discovered an especially degrading Web site based in Calgary that posted sexually explicit photos of Native women who clearly were living the hard life on the streets. Boudreau recognized some of the women from her days of partying in the seedier bars in downtown Calgary and worried that the Web site operator might be a budding serial killer who would grow bolder as time passed. She went to the media after becoming frustrated by the lack of interest in the matter on the part of the Calgary police.
She was still in recovery and was not identified in our December 2002 story about the Web site, but she played a key role in the story that was the first to draw national attention to the fact that a disproportionate number of Native women are missing across the country. Some activists say as many as 500 Native women are presently unaccounted for.
We also discovered, while talking to a variety of experts for that story, that there is a class of offender that preys on the marginalized women working the streets in Canada, enabled by the attitudes and biases of mainstream society. The experts told us then that these criminals take advantage of the fact that the public and police have less interest in prosecuting crimes against prostitutes than those crimes that are perpetrated against other citizens.
Since the Windspeaker story, several other national media outlets have looked into the problem.
Books have been published on the subject. The Pickton case in Vancouver, where Robert Pickton has been charged with the deaths of more than a dozen prostitutes, most of whom are Native, is proceeding to trial. In all cases, evidence has emerged showing the police were slow to act.
It was only recently that the RCMP admitted there appears to be one or more serial offenders stalking the strolls of Edmonton. Twelve sex trade workers have been found dead on the outskirts of the Alberta capital over the last 17 years. Most of the victims have been Native women.
On Aug. 11, the RCMP added 10 more investigators to Project KARE, a special task force established in 2003 involving the Mounties and the Edmonton Police Service that is looking into the cases of these murdered women (bringing the total number of officers to 35) . Project KARE has acknowledged 70 victims across the Prairies who lived a "high-risk lifestyle." Many other potential victims are listed simply as missing.
Boudreau's friend Fugate, 22, is a non-Native woman from the small farming community of High Bluff, Man. Outraged by the fact that authorities and the community at large seem to care less about dead prostitutes than about other dead women, she started up a Web site-http://bekkie.proboards52.com-in early August. On that site, people share information and do what they can to help missing women or their families.
Neither Boudreau nor Fugate has ever been involved in prostitution. Fugate joked that her small town childhood was "all butterflies and kittens," but added she can't sit idly by while some lives are deemed less important than others.
After the Devon RCMP had the file on Teri-lynn for more than a month and had produced no results in locating her, Boudreau said she spent just three hours networking on the phone before finding her.
"Sunday we met up with her mother and Wednesday they spotted her in Cranbrook. All that time the police didn't do anything. After we found her they made it out that they'd worked so hard on finding her when in all actuality they'd basically told [her mother] that unless there's a body they weren't going to investigate," said Boudreau.
"No body, no investigation" was also the response the women received from Project KARE investigators when they volunteered to go out scouring the fields on the edge of Edmonton looking for the bodies of other missing women.
Both women noted that the media, the general public and the police did not wait for bodies in a couple of recent cases where middle-class Caucasian women were reported missing. In two high profile cases-one in Edmonton and one in Toronto-great effort was put into searches and, once remains were found within a matter of days, even greater effort was put into raising money for trust funds for the victims' families.
Fugate said that admirable response should not be reserved for only some victims.
"I'd see headlines like: 'Prostitute slain.' And the story was, 'Yeah she was murdered but she was a prostitute so it's OK.' And I thought that wasn't right," she said. "People keep asking, 'Is he going to graduate to killing more respectable people?' Well, who cares? He's killing people. It doesn't matter if he's killing a housewife or a sex trade worker. They're people. They don't deserve to die."
So she went on the Project KARE Web site's electronic forum and, when Boudreau posted the mother's complaints that police were not actively searching for Teri-lynn House, she got an idea.
"I thought, 'How hard is it for us to take a couple of hours on our day off, go out there, talk to her, get some information and make some phone calls.' From there, we were really high off the fact that we had found her within a couple of days and we wondered, 'What if we can do this again and again and again?' Why not? It just makes us feel really good to help someone who isn't able to get the help they need," Fugate added.
It's more personal for Boudreau. She knew several of the Edmonton murder victims, including Rachel Quinney, a 19-year-old whose body was found outside the city in June 2004. Quinney was married to Boudreau's best friend's older brother. She knew the Quinney family when she was growing up.
"The day they found the body I was on the phone with [her best friend] and she said 'I've got a call on the other line.' I said I'd wait. She came back on and said, 'You know that body they found? It was Rachel.' I couldn't believe it. I remember her as little Rachel. I was pretty broken up,"
Boudreau said.
The two women have asked the police to let them help them search for other missing women. Their requests have been denied by investigators who worry that untrained amateurs could contaminate a crime scene and destroy important evidence.
"What's the difference between us coming across something and someone walking their dog?"
Boudreau asked. "Teach us what to do. If you guys don't have the manpower to do it, we'll go out in our spare time and then at least something's being done. Have the police ever found any of the bodies or has it always been someone stumbling across something?"
"Give us a day's training or send a police officer with us. Have someone with us so that you know we're not doing anything to mess up the case," Fugate added. "And we'll go out and do whatever needs to be done. I just don't understand why they're not willing to even attempt to help."
But the differences in the level of public sympathy for middle-class victims versus desperate, impoverished and frequently drug-addicted victims who are forced into prostitution to survive remains glaring-and hypocritical, the two women said.
"The thing about prostitution is it all comes back to religion, basically. Sex is known as a sin," said Boudreau.
Boudreau knows well that young girls flee the much-publicized economic and social problems back home on the reserve in search of a job or an education. They come to the cities and-for a number of reasons, not the least of which is racism-frequently find themselves unemployed and struggling. Cheap and highly addictive drugs like crystal meth and crack cocaine are a rapidly spreading scourge in the inner cities where these desperate people almost always end up.
Prostitution all too often becomes the only way to survive. And even then, poverty increases the chances of tragic death.
"Prostitution isn't illegal. Solicitation is illegal, which just seems silly to me. But if prostitution is legal, then why not get these women into somewhere safe? These women that are on the street, don't make them pay $1,700 a year to register themselves as an escort," Fugate said.
That's the approximate cost of a license to run an escort service in Edmonton. The money is payable to the city. Also required is a criminal record check. If you've been convicted of solicitation, you get rejected and you get to stand on a street corner with all the dangers that brings. But if you've got $1,700 a year for a city license you can be a great deal less marginalized and a whole lot safer.
Monica Valiquette has operated an escort service in Edmonton for 27 years. She told Windspeaker the city fathers know what goes on in these businesses they regulate and license.
For the community to look down on prostitutes while taking their money is pure hypocrisy, she said. And city regulations that allow only those that have the $1,700 a year and have managed to avoid conviction to have the relative safety of escort work makes the city complicit in the harm that befalls those forced to work the streets, she added.
"I just feel the communities have blood on their hands," she said. "There was a case a few years back where one of the girls was suing the city for living off the avails of prostitution, but it just turned into a mess in the courts."George Young, Windspeaker Staff Writer, Edmonton
Alberta Venture magazine has named Aboriginal Multi-Media Society (AMMSA) publisher Bert Crowfoot to its list of the top 100 entrepreneurs who helped to build the province. The magazine published the list to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Alberta.
Windspeaker is part of the publishing arm of AMMSA, which also includes Alberta Sweetgrass, Saskatchewan Sage, Raven's Eye for British Columbia and Ontario Birchbark. It also owns CFWE, a provincial Aboriginal radio station.
Crowfoot first started in the news business back in 1977 with the now defunct Alberta Native Communications Society.
Faced with hard times and making silver jewelry as a means of support, he started freelance writing for the Native People newspaper to help provide for his family. This was a departure from his original plans to go to Brigham Young University in Utah to become a physical education teacher and a coach.
Crowfoot stepped into the world of journalism when he was asked to cover a basketball tournament because he enjoyed sports and knew the sports slang and lingo. Sports reporting led to photography, and that led to editing, and editing led to sales, and eventually Crowfoot learned every aspect of the publishing business. He came to the realization that an Aboriginal newspaper could make money and not have to rely on government funding to exist.
The Native Communications Society lost its funding in 1982, and Crowfoot started AMMSA from its ashes in 1983. Today AMMSA is flourishing with revenue at $3 million-plus a year, and is the largest Aboriginal media outlet in the country.
In his interview with Alberta Venture magazine, Crowfoot described the importance of an independent media.
"There is Aboriginal media controlled by political organizations. In that media, what is published or broadcast, is what the politicians want the people to hear. We are 100 per cent independent and it is especially important on the political side because our writers are respected because of their objectivity. We have taken federal politicians to task; we have taken our own politicians-whether they have been national, provincial or local chiefs-to task. If the story needs to be written, we write it without fear of reprisal from anybody," he said.
It was always Crowfoot's goal to ensure AMMSA was rooted in a solid foundation of good journalistic principles. In Crowfoot's previous experience with the Alberta Native Communications Society, politicians who ran the board fired anyone who wrote a negative story about them or their associates.
Crowfoot was beginning to witness the same thing starting to happen at AMMSA in the early 1980s. A showdown occurred between the political members of the board and those who favored independent reporting. After the smoke cleared, the politicians had resigned from the board and AMMSA became free from political interference. AMMSA continues to have a board of directors that is dedicated to impartial news reporting.
