Chief Adjudicator wants confidential residential school testimony destroyed
Next month, an Ontario court will hear arguments as to the fate of 800,000 confidential documents detailing abuse at Residential Schools. Dan Shapiro, the chief adjudicator of the Independent Assessment Process, is asking for the testimony of Residential School Survivors who filed claims with the secretariat, to be destroyed to protect the victims' privacy. ...
Next month, an Ontario court will hear arguments as to the fate of 800,000 confidential documents detailing abuse at Residential Schools . Dan Shapiro, the chief adjudicator of the Independent Assessment Process, is asking for the testimony of Residential School Survivors who filed claims with the secretariat, to be destroyed to protect the victims' privacy.
"Is there a need for historians to have the intimate details of how individual lives have been affected through very significant abuses? Is that intimate detail necessary to create the historic record?"
At issue is the balance between the historic record and personal privacy.
The director of the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Ry Moran, says the destruction of the archive would be a travesty.
Mr. Shapiro argues that many individuals would not have testified if they had known that their stories would be archived.
"I don't think that one can lose sight of the fact that there are individuals involved who have carried great, great shame and considerable fear about what would happen if their communities and families found out."