Catholic Church petition: A huge opportunity just landed – please act!

Hello everyone, in yesterday’s Throne Speech in Canada, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary May Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General, said: “We know that reconciliation cannot come without truth. As the Government continues to respond to the Calls to Action, it will invest in that truth ……. with the appointment of a Special Interlocutor to further advance justice on residential schools.”

This represents a huge opportunity for each of us – over 27,000 and rising – to ask the federal government to strike a formal inquiry into the botched 2015 agreement with the Roman Catholic Church in Canada. This is something Indigenous leaders have been demanding for years, along with the highly respected Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former judge, legal scholar, and director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.

This inquiry would get at the full truth about what happened in the settlements. This is critical to Indigenous peoples in Canada – as Cree Elder AJ Felix states: “If we don’t know the truth, there can be no reconciliation”.

Newly named Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said he wants to get to the bottom of why the Federal Government abandoned its appeal of a ruling releasing the Catholic Church from its settlement obligations to residential school survivors. "I am as puzzled as everyone," he told The Canadian Press. "I don't know what there is to do yet."

Please write to Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller and answer his question: ask him to meet the Throne Speech commitment by immediately striking a formal inquiry into the 2015 settlement and to truly hold the RCC accountable. You can reference:

• The RCC has intentionally, consistently and aggressively dodged its formal agreement obligations despite every other Church and government meeting their commitments.
• Tom McMahon, Lead Counsel for the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) has stated his belief that the Church’s deplorable behavior after it signed the 2005 settlement effectively legally nullifies that agreement and that a new lawsuit should be pursued against the Church.
• The highly questionable if not illegal use of charitable funds by the RCC – subsidized by every Canadian taxpayer - requires scrutiny. For example, it spent more than 25% of funds it promised to survivors on its own “expenses’, which experts and Indigenous leaders described as outrageous. There are many more egregious examples.
• The federal government in the 2015 court case claimed, "There are also a large number of serious accounting discrepancies that are alarming to Canada”. The RCC used and still uses highly questionable - if not fraudulent or criminal - legal and accounting means to avoid accountability, minimize financial payouts, and to hide assets.
• The federal government has already distributed over $5 Billion to Residential School survivors and yet the Catholic Church has begrudgingly paid a tiny fraction of that, while somehow finding hundreds of millions of dollars for cathedral renovations including gold-covered art.  The RCC claimed poverty in arguing to be exempted from meeting the 2005 Agreement. In 2016, Pierre Baribeau, the lawyer for the Canadian Catholic Church's Corporation of Catholic Entities, suggested that fundraising to pay the $25 million reparation for residential school survivors would not happen as many church organizations were already near bankruptcy, as reported by the Globe and Mail.
• The Church’s pledge to raise $30M in 5 years, if it ever happens, doesn’t even meet what the Church agreed to pay in 2005. Indigenous leaders say it is far too little, especially given the vastly under-reported wealth of the Church in Canada (tens of billions of dollars).
• Canadians should be able to hold charities accountable because they receive tax benefits and donations from the public. Kate Bahen, Charity Intelligence’s managing director said: “We have a right to know how charities spend our money.” The federal government has this responsibility and yet has failed for years.

CONTACT INFO:

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller

Email: Marc.Miller@parl.gc.ca

Mail (may be sent postage-free to any member of Parliament):

House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
K1A 0A6

You may also choose to cc. your own MP (https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en and Prime Minister Trudeau (justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca and  https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/Justin-Trudeau(58733)#contact

In the meantime, thank you for continuing to demand justice for Residential School survivors – we still have a long way to go.

Sincerely, David Thomson