Conflicting court views on legal fees leave '60s Scoop lawyers in limbo

BY THE CANADIAN PRESS
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: AUG 15, 2018

TORONTO — Class-action lawyers who secured a landmark $750-million compensation deal for Indigenous victims of the ’60s Scoop have been left in fee limbo amid conflicting views as to how much they deserve.
Under the settlement, which required separate approvals from both Federal Court and an Ontario court, Ottawa agreed to pay $75 million to the law firms involved.
The lawyers further agreed to split the fees 50-50 between the two groups — one group comprising the Toronto lawyers who began the case in Superior Court in 2009, the other comprising three firms who pursued their action through Federal Court.

In June, Federal Court Judge Michel Shore approved the $37.5 million earmarked for the lawyers in his court. The amount was “fair and reasonable” and amounted to less than 10 per cent of the overall global payment, said Shore, who had helped mediate settlement discussions.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba, however, took a much dimmer view of the fee deal.
He delivered a blistering indictment of the agreement, calling $75 million in fees rich beyond reasonable and the system for compensating class-action lawyers broken. He also railed at the split, saying the Federal Court lawyers simply didn’t deserve anywhere near half the total, or $37.5 million.

“This decision was a bolt of lightning on this topic,” said Kirk Baert, who represents one of the three groups of Federal Court lawyers.
Belobaba did sign off on the class-action settlement, but only after the lawyers on the Ontario end agreed the fee issue would be resolved separately. The Federal Court lawyers, however, balked at re-opening the arrangement.
“Why would class counsel, after the bargain has been struck and after we’ve lost all our leverage by going for a settlement approval, agree to take less?” Baert said. “The answer is: We’re not going to.”
Still, in light of the change to the Ontario deal, the national lawyers headed back to Federal Court to again secure approval for their end of the class action.
As Shore had done previously, Federal Court Judge Michael Phelan signed an order on Aug. 2, with the agreement of the parties involved, approving both the settlement and $37.5 million in fees for the lawyers in his court.
According to one source who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the matter, Belobaba had expected a full hearing in Federal Court on the lawyer fees. After receiving Phelan’s order on Aug. 3, the source said Belobaba began asking for details about what Phelan’s decision had been based on.
Days later, Phelan wrote the Federal Court parties to ask for “submissions on the current motion for approval of fees.” Two days later, he further wrote that nothing in his order “should be taken as either explicitly or implied approval of counsel’s fees.”
“His directions have left a little bit of confusion,” Baert said. “(But) these fees have now been approved twice. It’s done.”
A telephone conference with Phelan and the lawyers involved aimed at clarifying the situation is set for Thursday.
Belobaba appears to be awaiting the outcome of those discussions before deciding how much the Ontario lawyers deserve.
Morris Cooper, who along with Toronto lawyer Jeffery Wilson was instrumental in reaching a settlement in the Ontario case, said Belobaba should accept that the national lawyers have been awarded $37.5 million and approve the same amount for the Ontario group.
“I’m hopeful he will conclude that we shouldn’t be penalized if he’s dissatisfied with how the Federal Court has dealt with it,” Cooper said. “That would be grossly unfair in our view based on his own findings that we were the ones who did everything and deserve at least twice as much as them.”
Baert, who called Belobaba’s views “mystifying,” said it would be up to the legislature or appeal courts to make any changes to how class-action lawyers are compensated. The judge’s view that fees should be calculated differently for settlements over $100 million makes no sense, Baert said.
“Class actions don’t happen in a vacuum,” Baert said. “Law firms bring them and they pay for them. So when they do their jobs, they should get paid and they should get paid what the defendant agreed to pay.”
The fee issue has no bearing on how much will be paid to victims of the ’60s Scoop — Indigenous children who lost their cultural heritage after being taken from their homes and placed with non-Indigenous families. Each will receive between $25,000 and $50,000, depending on how many file claims.

Between Two Worlds: Wayne William Snellgrove

Wayne Snellgrove (center) lives in Miami (File Photo)

‘We were lost between 2 worlds,’ survivor of Canada aboriginal kids’ adoption tells RT

SOURCE

Download video (13.59 MB) Please watch!
Earlier story about Wayne on this blog HERE

US national swimming champion Wayne William Snellgrove, one of the victims of Canada’s so-called “Scoop” program, an adoption scheme though which Aboriginal Canadian children were placed with white families, has told RT it stripped survivors of their identities.
“They’re lost between two worlds, they’re not part of the native culture and they don’t assimilate well with the white culture. They’ve lost their identity and it’s a really sad thing,” Snellgrove told RT about the thousands of kids who were taken from their homes from the 1960s to the 1980s, of which he was one.

Snellgrove himself was taken from his Saskatchewan mother at birth in the 1970s, and spent the first few years of his life in the care of the Canadian government. He was eventually adopted by a white family in the United States, and did not meet his birth mother until he was 32.
“I realized I had been in mourning my entire life and didn’t even know it,” he told RT of the adoption.

Snellgrove also recounted some the fraught historical context for the misguided and damaging adoption policy.
“They [white European settlers] have a very dark history of the way they treated the Aboriginal population. They tortured, they killed them, they murdered them, they raped them. All these stories are part of my story they’re part of my culture.”


The swimming champ recalled feeling out of place and lost with his American family. Though Snellgrove says he was placed into a loving home and that his adoptive parents tried their best to raise him, he was still plagued by depression and could not assimilate into white culture.
“They gave me every opportunity, but the thing is I’m not white. I did not assimilate well into white culture… There were still feelings of loss and abandonment as to why I was with the family I was with,” he said.

Though Snellgrove got the chance to meet his mother after hiring a private investigator and searching for her for seven years, he says that others are not so lucky.
“There were hundreds of kids taken from my reserve, hundreds of kids taken across Canada – thousands of kids. And from my reserve I was the third one to make it back – the third one ever to touch my ancestral lands again,” he told RT.

ARCHIVE PHOTO: First Nations protesters march towards Parliament Hill in Ottawa January 11, 2013. (Reuters / Chris Wattie)

Many of these children are now seeking reparations from the Canadian government. More than 1,800 people have signed onto a class action suit lawsuit. The plaintiffs are being represented by the Merchant Law Group, which served the federal government with the suit in late January.
Tony Merchant, the head legal counsel at Merchant, claims that children suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse as a result of the program. He criticized it as a misguided paternalistic attempt at assimilating Aboriginal Canadian children.

"It was part of the paternalistic approach, that if we could get children out of the hands of Aboriginal people, we could give them a better life in the future by taking away their culture and turning red children into white adults," he was quoted as saying by CBC.

Aboriginal adoptees sue Ottawa for loss of culture, emotional trauma

By Chinta Puxley | The Canadian Press | February 9, 2015

 

 

Photo: The StarPhoenix, file photo

Almost 1,200 adoptees in Saskatchewan have filed a class-action lawsuit seeking compensation for their loss of culture and emotional trauma. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes by Canadian child welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families.

Aboriginals who were adopted into white families during the so-called '60s Scoop are suing the federal government for their loss of culture and emotional trauma.
Almost 1,200 adoptees have filed a class-action lawsuit in Saskatchewan seeking compensation from Ottawa for "cultural genocide."

From the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes by child-welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families, some in the United States. Many consider the adoptions as an extension of residential schools, which aimed to "take the Indian out of the child."
David Chartrand, who joined the lawsuit, was taken from his Manitoba family at the age of five and moved to Minnesota.

"They wanted maids, butlers. They wanted slavery and to do it legally. We just fit that criteria," said the 52-year-old Metis man. "I was made to clean the house, be their slave, be the punching bag."
Chartrand said Canada had a duty to protect him and others like him. Although he returned to his home community of Camperville, Man., in his 20s, he lost everything, he said.

"I lost my life, my childhood." he said. "We want to put it behind us so we can move on."

The lawsuit, which was filed last month, is seeking unspecified damages for everything from loss of identity to sexual and physical abuse. Regina lawyer Tony Merchant said many of the children who were adopted weren't in unsafe homes but were taken simply as another way to assimilate aboriginal people.

"It was a part of taking red babies and trying to make them into white adults."

Having been raised by a white family with no cultural support, many survivors have struggled to reclaim their roots, Merchant said.

"They've just been lost from their culture."

People who were part of the '60s Scoop have been calling for a formal apology from Ottawa. They also want compensation for their experience, which many argue was just as traumatic as that suffered by residential school survivors. But while those who were sent to residential schools have had a formal apology and have been able to participate in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, '60s Scoop adoptees haven't been formally recognized.

Other lawsuits have been filed on behalf of adoptees. A class-action lawsuit by some survivors in Ontario in 2009 is still making its way through the courts.

Chartrand worries any resolution to this lawsuit will come too late for many adoptees who are aging and suffering from increasing ill health. For those adoptees who ended up in prison or committed suicide, Chartrand said, any resolution comes too late.

"As an Indian, you have a spirit. That spirit has to come back home.
"It's not about the money. It's about these kids that are dead out there."

SOURCE

The 60s Scoop Lawsuit

This is the blog and website for Canadian First Nations Adoptees to get the latest updates and information concerning the class action for survivors of the Sixties Scoop. If you are a First Nations adoptee, you can contact them and add your name to the lawsuit. One of these days, America will have its own class action lawsuit... (that's my prayer it happens in my lifetime).