The residential schools settlement’s biggest winner: A profile of Tony Merchant

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 10:58 AM - 0 Comments

A massive data leak has revealed information about thousands of people who stored their money in offshore tax havens, including hundreds of Canadians. One of the most prominent Canadians named was Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant, a controversial figure who was a major player in the residential schools settlement and who, the documents show, stored $1.7 million in offshore accounts during a battle with Revenue Canada. Maclean’s senior writer Jonathon Gatehouse profiled Merchant in 2006. Here’s the story, as it appeared in the Sept. 11, 2006 issue:

Regina lawyer Tony Merchant (left) and former Progressive Conservative MLA Colin Thatcher during a court appearance, March 4, 1983. (CP)

There are six Dictaphones spread out like a fan on the table in Tony Merchant’s hotel-suite-cum-Ottawa-office, each labelled with the name of a different secretary. It’s more efficient that way, as he bounces from file to file, shuffling through the stacks of legal documents set out before him. When the tapes are full, he couriers them home to Regina to be transcribed into letters, court submissions and statements of claim. Time is money.

Merchant may well be the busiest lawyer in Canada. By his own account, he billed an astounding 5,300 hours last year — an average of almost 15 hours each and every day, devoted solely to his clients.(A lawyer who bills 2,000 hours annually is considered a top producer at most big Canadian firms, and that requires lots of late evenings and weekends.)The fact that Merchant sleeps only a few hours a night helps. So does his long-ago acquired habit of eating only one meal a day — dinner. Still, it doesn’t leave much time for family life, or his other passions, travel and politics. Merchant’s wife, Pana, a Liberal senator for Saskatchewan, recalls a recent Christmas Day when they had five of Tony’s clients scattered throughout the house, waiting to discuss their cases.

Merchant’s firm, the Merchant Law Group, employs about 40 lawyers, including his three sons, based mostly in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. It claims to have the largest family law practice in Canada, and is involved in more than two dozen class action lawsuits, including product liability claims against General Motors, Sears, and the makers of Paxil, Vioxx, and silicon breast implants, as well as actions on behalf of shareholders of Molson Inc. and Hollinger Inc. But that’s not the legal work Tony Merchant has been banking on for the past decade. Continue…

New research finds 3,000 confirmed residential school deaths

By Colin Perkel - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – At least 3,000 children, including four under the age of 10 found huddled together in frozen embrace, are now known to have died during attendance at Canada’s Indian residential schools, according to new unpublished research.

While deaths have long been documented as part of the disgraced residential school system, the findings are the result of the first systematic search of government, school and other records.

“These are actual confirmed numbers,” Alex Maass, research manager with the Missing Children Project, told The Canadian Press from Vancouver.

Continue…

New research finds at least 3,000 confirmed Indian residential school deaths

By Colin Perkel - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – At least 3,000 children, including four under the age of 10 found huddled together in frozen embrace, are now known to have died during attendance at Canada’s Indian residential schools, according to new unpublished research.

While deaths have long been documented as part of the disgraced residential school system, the findings are the result of the first systematic search of government, school and other records.

“These are actual confirmed numbers,” Alex Maass, research manager with the Missing Children Project, told The Canadian Press from Vancouver.

“All of them have primary documentation that indicates that there’s been a death, when it occurred, what the circumstances were.” Continue…

Visualizing First Nations deprivation with boxes & whiskers

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, February 10, 2013 at 3:46 AM - 0 Comments

Sometime last year I found myself wondering about the effects of residential schools on the younger generations of aboriginal Canadians. The schools have more supporters than you might think, more than almost anyone likes to admit, amongst former attendees; the resentment felt toward them by those who had terrible experiences is matched by the ferocity with which Indian families agitated to keep the better ones alive late in their existence. We have chosen to take a monolithic view of the residential schools as a bad idea, full stop—to the point at which any educational intervention into Indian welfare that smacks of paternalism will now be run from as if it were a rabid grizzly. (Just for starters, the scale of the residential schools was obviously one of the problems; if there had been four, instead of 80 or more, they could perhaps have been run with some professionalism and accountability.)

It is hard to be sure that this is fortunate. And it is hard to be sure that it is helpful, for if there are other systematic explanations for Indian poverty and social issues, the “it’s all because of those hellish residential schools” explanation might cause us to overlook them. The schools have been shut down for a long time now; they can’t be blamed for the remainder of eternity, any more than I can attribute my incompetence with money to the Highland Clearances. Though maybe I should give it some thought.

Anyway, it turns out that there are surprisingly detailed data concerning Indian social welfare. The federal Aboriginal Affairs department collects and calculates a “community well-being index” for all Canadian communities, and has used the numbers to identify top-performing Indian bands, in order that policy lessons might be extracted from them. The latest index data are old, dating to the 2006 census, but visualizing them still teaches useful things about Indian societal health.

The tool I used is called a “box-and-whisker plot”, or, for short, a “boxplot”. The Great Tukey (peace be upon him) gave the boxplot to us, describing it as a “microscope” for data analysis. But presenters of statistical information for public consumption don’t show boxplots very often, because their features are not too intuitive. It lets you put series of numbers side-by-side and eyeball them for differences in the distributions. The parts of a boxplot are thus: (1) a box around the “interquartile range”, or the middle half of the data; (2) a line through the box at the median; (3) a “whisker” usually extending outward from the box up to 1.5 times the interquartile range from the median (but no further than the furthest actual data); (4) individual dots for outlying data points beyond the whisker. The length of the whisker was chosen by Tukey so that data matching a normal, symmetrical bell curve would have few outlying points, no more than 1% of the sample; many dots are thus a convenient quick indication that a data set is non-normal. (That’s important for statisticians because it rules out further analysis techniques that assume normality.)

I’m not going to quiz you on all that: a boxplot is not too intuitive, but it’s intuitive enough that you can just look and feel. So here’s a picture of First Nations well-being (as of 2006) broken down by province, with tiny P.E.I., largely FN-free Newfoundland, and Inuit communities set aside:

Why did I want to look at this information this way? Because Canada actually performed an inadvertent natural experiment with residential schools: in New Brunswick (and in Prince Edward Island) they did not exist. If the schools had major negative effects on social welfare flowing forward into the future we now inhabit, New Brunswick’s Indians would be expected to do better than those in other provinces. And that does turn out to be the case. You can see that the top three-quarters of New Brunswick Indian communities would all be above the median even in neighbouring Nova Scotia, whose FN communities might otherwise be expected to be quite comparable. (Remember that each community, however large, is just one point in these data. Toronto’s one point, with an index value of 84. So is Kasabonika Lake, estimated 2006 population 680, index value 47.)

On the other hand, and this is exactly the kind of thing boxplots are meant to help one notice, the big between-provinces difference between First Nations communities isn’t the difference between New Brunswick and everybody else. It’s the difference between the Prairie Provinces and everybody else including New Brunswick—to such a degree, in fact, that Canada probably should not be conceptually broken down into “settler” and “aboriginal” tiers, but into three tiers, with prairie Indians enjoying a distinct species of misery. (This shows up in other, less obvious ways in the boxplot diagram. You notice how many lower-side outliers there are in Saskatchewan? That dangling trail of dots turns out to consist of Indian and Métis towns in the province’s north—communities that are significantly or even mostly aboriginal, but that aren’t coded as “FN” in the dataset.)

I fear that the First Nations data for Alberta are of particular note here: on the right half of the diagram we can see that Alberta’s resource wealth (in 2006, remember) helped nudge the province ahead of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in overall social-development measures, but it doesn’t seem to have paid off very well for Indians. This isn’t a surprising outcome, mind you, if you live in Alberta; we have rich Indian bands and plenty of highly visible band-owned businesses, but the universities are not yet full of high-achieving members of those bands, and the downtown shelters in Edmonton, sad to say, still are.

These little boxes go some way toward explaining why the Harper government’s focus on Indian-band accountability may make less sense to Ontarians than it does to Albertans—or why Harper’s prairie base might have had a different reaction to the conditions and the controversy in Attawapiskat than Eastern voters did. It is data of which everyone should be aware, and I wish there were an easier, more natural way to depict it. I’m also curious about how the same data will look once they’re compiled from the 2011 census, heaven knows when.

Judge to federal government: Turn over Indian residential schools files

By Colin Perkel - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 2:24 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – The federal government is obliged to turn over its archival records on Indian residential schools to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an Ontario court decided Thursday.

In his decision, Justice Stephen Goudge said the obligation to provide the materials is clear from the settlement agreement that established the commission.

“The plain meaning of the language is straightforward,” Goudge said. “It is to provide all relevant documents to the TRC.”

The decision comes in an increasingly acrimonious dispute between Ottawa and the commission over millions of government documents the commission says it needs to fulfil its core mandate.

The government maintained it had no obligation to provide the records in Library and Archives Canada.

Continue…

Q&A: Romeo Saganash (Part One)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 2:43 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Romeo Saganash in a debate during the NDP leadership race in December 2011. (Fred Chartrand/CP)

After an incident aboard an Air Canada plane in October, NDP MP Romeo Saganash acknowledged that he had a dependence on alcohol and announced that he would be taking a leave to seek treatment. The former Cree leader and negotiator returned to work yesterday. I sat down with him in his Parliament Hill office this morning to talk about his fight against alcoholism, his experiences as a child in a residential school, #IdleNoMore, Theresa Spence and his role as an aboriginal in politics. This is part one of our conversation. Part two is here.

First of all, how are you doing?

Very well. I’m glad to be back. I missed a lot of things apparently. (laughs)

Yeah, just a couple things happened while you were away. How has the last month or so gone? I take it you went through a program or some kind of treatment, how did that go?

That went very well. I’m glad I did it. I told my leader that that was probably the best decision I ever took in my entire career. It taught me a lot of things. It taught me to work on myself and care about myself as well. And that’s important. I was just recalling with the previous reporter that I started out back in 1981 when the late Billy Diamond called upon me to work for the Grand Council of Cree, so I’ve been in this for a long time. And I guess throughout this period, at one point you forget about yourself.

Had it ever been suggested to you, had anyone ever said to you before this, that they thought you might have a problem?

No.

It never occurred to you, either?

Well, perhaps at times, yeah, but not really directly, no one has ever… I think the way that I looked at it over the years was that if it started affecting my job than there’s something wrong. But that never happened, so I just went on with things. And then this incident happened and I said to myself, well, okay, perhaps there might be a problem.

In that statement you released when you said you were going to take some time off, you talked about a few things, one of them being your residential school experience. Do you see that as the root of things? Is that where the trouble starts?

Well, I don’t necessarily want to blame what happened on anything else besides me. I’m the one at the end of the day that took decisions about many things, including alcohol. And I accept that responsibility and I admitted that responsibility and I went and sought help and treatment. But certainly one of the things that they try to teach or that you learn in treatment is that there’s a time when you have to look back on where you come from. And definitely one of the things that I thought about a lot is how my 10 years in a residential school affected who I am today, or tainted who I am today and the way I am today. Definitely. Most definitely. Ten years is a long time. Continue…

Truth commission has no power to drag government into court, lawyer argues

By Colin Perkel - Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 9:36 AM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – The federal government is arguing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has no authority to take part in legal action.

It says the commission is simply a department of government without any legal standing.

The commission was set up to settle a class action arising out of the Indian residential school system.

It is in court in Toronto hoping to force the government to provide millions of documents it wants. Continue…

‘A turning point’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 7, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Romeo Saganash restates his position on secession and recounts his life.

Saganash was ripped from the bosom of his nomadic Cree family near the remote northern Quebec village of Waswanipi and shipped to a residential school some 500 kilometres away in La Tuque. ”A very traumatic experience for anybody,” he recently told The Canadian Press.

In his own case, the experience was made immeasurably worse within six months of his arrival at the school, when the priest in charge called him and his siblings into his office to inform them that their father had died. In the next breath, Saganash recalls, the priest advised them: “We don’t have the budgets to send you there (for the funeral) so you’ll have to do your grieving here in the residential school. I still recall the scene when he gave us the bad news, we were sitting in front of the director, the priest. I still recall my brothers and sisters were crying and crying and crying and I was just there staring at him. That was, I think, a turning point for me.”

Rashomonitoba

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:41 AM - 1 Comment

The Manitoba government has completed its independent review of abusive practices at the Cathedral Valley Group Home (1971-83) near Grandview. Barry Tuckett’s report is an impressive work of historical inquiry, but it is, perhaps inherently, somewhat unsatisfying. The government, clearly eager to quell the entreaties of former residents at the work farm for troubled and delinquent children, immediately endorsed the report; its family services minister also issued an apology “to those harmed by their residency.” Continue…

BTC: Seen and heard

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 16, 2008 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments

Out for a walk along Elgin St. in Ottawa on Saturday and came across Pierre Poilievre, dressed in a sensible blue shirt and less sensible long pants. What, you might ask, was Mr. Poilievre doing out on this warm weekend afternoon?

Good question. His riding of Nepean-Carleton does not extend so far north as to include that busy stretch of Elgin (one of the few spots in Ottawa you can use the term “busy stretch” to describe). So if he was looking to make amends with constituents, he was far off course.

But back to the relevant details. Or at least the seemingly relevant details. Because Mr. Poilievre wasn’t just wandering about, sipping coffee and shopping at Mags & Fags. Continue…

Weekend Notes (Vol. 1, No. 19)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 2:57 AM - 0 Comments

In the print edition this week there are two pages under this byline on the enigmatic Peter Van Loan, thus marking the 376th time I’ve referred to the government House leader in print in my short time with this magazine. This time though there’s further commentary from Ralph Goodale, Michael Ignatieff, historian Ned Franks (who confesses he can’t watch QP anymore) and Senator David Smith.

It is perhaps an under-reported fact that Mr. Van Loan and the Senator, the party stalwart presently charged with running the next Liberal campaign, go back a ways and remain good friends—Senator Smith is quite sure he was the only Liberal at the House leader’s wedding not so long ago.

That there isn’t yet a wild-eyed conspiracy theory about the close association between the Prime Minister’s right-hand man and one of Mr. Dion’s primary election advisors is, suffice it to say, somewhat disappointing. Surely some enterprising blogger should have connected the dots by now. For shame. Continue…

Megapundit: Take that, Telecom Trotskyites!

By selley - Friday, June 13, 2008 at 1:22 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh on science vs. big pharma; Susan Riley on the residential schools apology; Dan Gardner on an oil price floor; Daphne Bramham on human trafficking in Canada.

Let’s make this complicated
While the government apologized for what the aboriginal residential schools were, some pundits seem determined to focus on what they weren’t.

“Had government agents come to round up your kids and mine, I doubt we would have kept quiet about it for 80 years or more,” Lorne Gunter writes in the Edmonton Journal in praise of yesterday’s apology. But it’s important to recognize, he argues, that the system was “well-intentioned” and not harmful or destructive in every single case. Which is a fair point—a sense of proportion is important. But comparing modern “native skills training” programs to the “early form of such training” offered at residential schools, and asking how the program could have been “evil” then but “magnanimous” now is ridiculous. Surely no educational system that’s predicated on abducting its students from their parents has any claim to magnanimousness, no matter what good it accomplishes.

John Robson, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, welcomes the apology but rejects the notion that the residential schools were “responsible for the catastrophic collision between traditional aboriginal culture and European modernity.” This is a notion we’d not come across until Robson introduced it, but we’re happy to join him in declaring it bunk. He also “utterly reject[s] any suggestion that Canadian aboriginals were dwelling in Eden until the Europeans came and expelled them”—again, never heard that one before, but it sounds perfectly reasonable to us.

Continue…

The Commons: Way to go, Skippy

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 6:22 PM - 0 Comments

And so the day of apology begets its own apology

The Scene. It couldn’t last. Or at least we knew it wouldn’t last. And, in some ways maybe, it shouldn’t last.

But who knew yesterday’s spirit of common good and cooperative effort was so null and void before most of us had even gotten around to feeling good about ourselves?

Indeed, before the Prime Minister had so much as spoken the first words of this Parliament’s most remarkable hour, exuberant Conservative Pierre Poilievre had put forward a revolutionary, if rather insensitive, reading on the politics of healing. Speaking with the “Lunch Bunch” on an Ottawa radio station, he suggested that compensation for the victims of physical and sexual abuse should be treated as investment. A full accounting required. A proper return demanded.

Worse still, he made gratuitous and silly use of the term “partook”—speaking, as it were, several classes above his weight.

The only surprise in what came next was that it took the Liberals a full 24 hours to formally demand Poilievre’s resignation. Continue…

Megapundit: You say tomato, I say diarrhea

By selley - Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 2:47 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: James Travers, Don Martin and Margaret Wente on the residential schools apology; Lawrence Martin on the carbon tax; Rosie DiManno on following the money in Afghanistan; Terence Corcoran on the Great Tomato Crisis of 2008.

Now what?
Yesterday’s apology for Canada’s aboriginal residential school system was much-needed and well-executed, all agree. How it translates into tangible improvements remains to be seen.

Considering how recently the Conservatives were “warning an official apology was five years off and dismiss[ing] talk of hefty compensation packages,” the Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin says the apology proves “just how motivated a minority government can be to deliver damage control ahead of what could become a fall election.” Nevertheless, he hastens to add, yesterday was a “goosebump-raising,” cynicism-dissolving affair. And while the apology “won’t fix a single aboriginal home, add one faucet’s worth of clean drinking water or prevent even one young native person’s suicide or incarceration,” he concludes, it’s reasonable to hope the past will now be “a little less difficult to bear” for forward-looking aboriginal communities.

If nothing else, the National Post‘s John Ivison believes “Harper may have addressed some of the concerns about his fitness to be Prime Minister. He showed leadership … in his willingness to confront a trauma that was never treated properly.” And that may help him regain some measure of support among Canadians who’ve grown tired with his and his ministers’ appalling (our word, not Ivison’s) attitude towards governance. More importantly, Phil Fontaine’s “impressive,” appreciative response suggests the apology may well help Canadian aboriginals move beyond victimhood.

Continue…

BTC: Apologia

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 10:16 PM - 0 Comments

A full review of the day will be up soon. The day’s key speeches, aside from the Prime Minister’s remarks, do not appear to have been posted online as yet. So below I’ll reprint excerpts from the apologies of Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion and Jack Layton, as well as the remarks of Phil Fontaine. Continue…

Pierre Poilievre shows his empathy for residential school survivors

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 5:17 PM - 0 Comments

After an introductory ramble from CFRA host Steve Madley, who muses that “we could go and argue whether [assimilation] was the right policy or the wrong policy,” Pierre Poilievre offers his thoughts on compensation for survivors, First Nations leadership, and where “all this money” is going:

“That gets to the heart of the problem on these reserves where there is too much power concentrated in the hands of the leadership, and it makes you wonder where all of this money is going. We spend $10 billion dollars – $10 billion dollars – in annual spending this year alone … now, that is an exceptional amount of money, and that is on top of all the resource revenue that goes to reserves that sit on petroleum products or sit on uranium mines or other things where companies have to pay them royalties and that’s on top of all that money that they earn on their own reserves. That is an incredible amount of money. Now along with this apology comes another $4 billion in compensation for those who partook in the residential schools over those years. Now, you know, some of us are starting to ask, ‘Are we really getting value for all of this money, and is more money really going to solve the problem?’ My view is that we need to engender the values of hard work and independence and self reliance. That’s the solution in the long run – more money will not solve it.”

Full interview here.

Megapundit: Wilma Flintstone on modern parenting

By selley - Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 2:23 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Andrew Cohen on Judaism in Poland; Jonathan Kay on the decline of jihadism; Barbara Yaffe on the gender equality commissioner.

Apologies, accusations and advice
The pundits weigh in on parliamentary contrition, Oily the Splot and a gender-balance promise too far.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin believes tomorrow’s apology to the victims of Canada’s residential school system is “doomed to disappoint in some quarters,” which in turn creates a risk that Canadians will become “flippant or fed up with the government response to the … tragedy.” (It’s already beginning—on National Post property, anyway.) And on both sides of the aisle in the House of Commons, Martin says there’s a growing sense of weariness over the number and frequency of the apologies Ottawa is handing out. “Sincerity can’t be bought,” he warns, “but cynicism can.”

You can’t blame the Tories for “framing [Stéphane Dion's] foolishly free-form carbon tax musings to their advantage,” says the Toronto Star‘s James Travers. “Blame them instead for being parsimonious with their own truths and, most of all, for slamming shut the government doors they promised, hand solemnly over heart, to throw open”—that is, for those who don’t speak the Traversian dialect, blame them for making government less open and accountable having promised to do the exact opposite. In fact, he argues, juvenile ad campaign creations like Oily the Splot are a necessary “diversion” for a government perpetually using “minority guerrilla tactics” to keep Parliament’s various committees out of its Cadscam, in-and-out and NAFTA-disasta business.

Continue…

National Post: Christie Blatchford has left the building

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 5:14 PM - 0 Comments

Over at the very thoughtful National Post group blog, Karen Selick asks:

“My husband went to elementary school in small-town Eastern Ontario in the 1940s. He tells me that there were many occasions when his teachers gave him ‘the strap.’ Lots of kids were punished or disciplined that way, in those days…

“By modern standards, my husband and his classmates were physically abused. Should they now be getting an apology from the government, and perhaps some compensation?”

Gee, Karen, that’s an excellent question. I can certainly understand your concern, and I can tell you’re a really smart, thoughtful person. I’ve given this matter a little thought myself. Here’s a handy checklist to ascertain whether your husband’s treatment rises to the level of what the Prime Minister will be addressing this week. Ready? Continue…

You can't beat the smooth, mellow flavour of a legally-produced cigarette

By selley - Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 1:46 PM - 954 Comments

Must-reads: Barbara Yaffe on Insite; John Ivison on contraband smokes; Don MacPherson on corporate welfare bums; Graham Thomson on social funding in Alberta.

Ol’ Man Harper, he’s set in his ways
No drugs, no new ideas, no sassback—and put out that dodgy cigarette, you punk!

“Sadly,” writes the Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe, “the decision about Insite’s future will not be made based on what is good or bad for the addicts or for the city of Vancouver,” but instead “on political considerations.” Luckily, however, the preponderance of evidence is so supportive of the safe-injection site’s continued operation (even if only to study its efficacy further), and the advocacy from the medical, political and academic communities is so convincing, that “boarding up Insite would cost [the Tories] support.” Right-wing ideologues or not, says Yaffe, now “is not the time for Harper’s party, pretty well tied with Liberals in polls, to be making moves that could cost support.” This is all perfectly logical and faultlessly argued. The fly in the ointment is the Harperites’ well-established penchant for needlessly inflicting pain upon themselves.

The Harper gang “is all about old-time religion,” says The Globe and Mail‘s Lawrence Martin—”all boilerplate and old stuff, … as dated as an Ed Broadbent suit.” Don’t believe him? He’s got corroborating evidence. Continue…