Commissioners Chief Wilton Littlechild, Justice Murray Sinclair and Marie Wilson (left to right) listened to testimonials as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
Photo Credit: Andrew Vaughan/CP

Truth and Reconciliation Commission faces huge new pile of documents

With little more than a year to finish its report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the physical and emotional abuses of Indigenous children in Canada’s Indian Residential School system, is about to receive tens of thousands of boxes of more documents, putting into question its capacity to end its work on time.

About 150,000 Indigenous youth were taken from their families and sent to the church-run residential school system which existed from the 1870s until the 1990s.

The documents the Commission will receive come more than a year after an Ontario provincial court ordered the federal government to hand over the material to the commission.

The inquiry was supposed to end in July, but its mandate has been has been extended by a year.

The chair of the commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, was not immediately available to comment.

But last year, before the one-year extension, he told Global News he worried the government would do a “document dump” as the commission’s mandate wound down.

More information:
Canadian Press/Steve Rennie – Huge pile of records to land on Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s doorstep – here
Toronto Star – Government ordered to hand over documents about infamous residential school – here
CBC – Reconciliation not opportunity to ‘get over it’: Justice Murray Sinclair – here
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada website – www.trc.ca

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Categories: Indigenous, Politics, Society
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