Wilson-Raybould wasn't consulted on freeing Catholic Church from residential school compensation deal: source
CBC
No one in the federal government is saying who made the final decision to relieve the Catholic Church of its financial responsibilities to residential school survivors.
But a source with direct knowledge of the controversial 2015 case told CBC News that then-minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't consulted, even though a lawyer in her department signed the final release.
"This is stunning. It's just unbelievable that the first Indigenous minister of justice was frozen out of a decision like this," said Tom McMahon, a former general legal counsel for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission who also spent 17 years as a lawyer in the Department of Justice.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, said she was also alarmed to hear that Wilson-Raybould was left out of the loop.
"This was a critical file on one of the most important issues facing the country," said Turpel-Lafond, a former Saskatchewan provincial court judge and member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.
"Why didn't they consult her? Were they worried she'd have a different opinion?"
A Department of Justice official referred a CBC interview request to the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations; no one at that department returned interview requests on Tuesday or Wednesday. Wilson-Raybould herself declined CBC News' interview request.