TRENTON, Canada
A retired priest pleaded not guilty Wednesday in a Canadian court to a sexual assault that allegedly occurred more than 50 years ago at an Indian Residential School.
Arthur Masse, 92, who was not in the courtroom, entered the plea through his lawyer, George Green.
The indecent assault involves a 10-year-old girl who was a student at Fort Alexander residential school in the province of Manitoba. Sexual and indecent assault are the same charge in Canada.
Masse was arrested and charged in June following a 10-year police investigation. The court hearing was held in Powerview, a small community of 1,300 people northeast of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
While authorities did not identify the victim, Victoria McIntosh, 63, of the Sagkeeng First Nation, stepped forward outside the courtroom and told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that she was the girl who Masse allegedly sexually assaulted.
She vowed to follow the trial to its conclusion.
"I'll be there every step of the way," McIntosh said. "Mr. Masse, come out and speak your truth as well, and I will speak mine."
Sagkeeng Chief Derrick Henderson suggested at an earlier court hearing that Masse be subjected to a sentencing circle, which is a First Nation justice process based on the premise that a crime is committed against the entire community, not just the victim. But the request was based on Masse pleading guilty.
Masse's next court date is Sept. 14.
The Fort Alexander residential school dates back to 1880, when it was founded and run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Catholic order. It was a day school which First Nation and Metis children attended and lived at for 10 months of the year. It closed in 1970.
Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.
A delegation of Canadian lawmakers has announced plans to visit Taiwan in October to seek economic opportunities in the Asia Pacific region, a move that could further stoke tensions between China and the West.
Members of a parliamentary committee on trade have been planning to visit the island state for some time, Canadian Liberal Member of Parliament Judy Sgro said on Wednesday.
"The intent is not to disrupt and cause problems for Taiwan, or problems for China. It's about trade, it's about friendship, it's about opportunities for Canada, in that whole Asia Pacific region," Sgro, who heads the trade panel, told the Reuters news agency.
The relationship between China and the West has worsened since US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month against Beijing's wishes.
China says Taiwan is its inseparable province and is against foreign politicians visiting the island. Taiwan, which maintains diplomatic ties with some 14 countries, says it is an independent country.
READ MORE: Is the US provoking China?
China's sanctions over Taiwan
In response to Pelosi's visit, China restricted trade and launched massive military drills around Taiwan, as well as slapped sanctions on Pelosi.
Beijing also imposed sanctions on a Lithuanian minister who visited Taiwan days after Pelosi's trip.
China said another trip by US lawmakers to the capital Taipei on Sunday was an infringement on its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada also did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Sgro said Canadian lawmakers have usually visited Taiwan twice a year in the past but stopped due to the coronavirus pandemic.
"This is part of an ongoing effort for us to ensure that the doors are open for Canadian companies wherever there's trade opportunity," Sgro said.
Conservative MP and vice chair on the trade committee, Randy Hoback, said he would seek guidance from the Canadian Foreign Ministry before deciding on visiting Taiwan.
"I think we need to get back to normalcy in a lot of things and one of that is in visits and having interaction from country to country," Hoback told Reuters.
READ MORE: US defends Pelosi's Taiwan visit as angry China warns of 'consequences'
READ MORE: China sanctions Taiwanese 'independence diehard' officials
Source: Reuters
OTTAWA — Following revelations that it has paid millions of dollars to sexual assault victims, hockey’s governing body in Canada said on Thursday that a former Supreme Court justice will lead an investigation into the organization.
The appointment of the justice, Thomas Cromwell, comes amid growing calls to overhaul the organization, Hockey Canada, and to transform the often sexualized culture that surrounds a sport that looms above all others in the country.
Marquee sponsors have abandoned Hockey Canada and the federal government froze millions of dollars of its funding after a sports television network reported in May that court documents showed the group had paid 3.5 million Canadian dollars to settle a lawsuit by a woman who accused members of the world junior team of sexual assault in 2018.
After that, Hockey Canada officials testified at a House of Commons committee that it had used a special fund to cover 7.6 million dollars to settle nine sexual assault and sexual abuse claims since 1989.
Further allegations of sexual assault involving Canada’s 2003 world junior championship team emerged in July. Several Canadians, including some politicians, blame Hockey Canada’s lack of oversight of the players, who were 18 to 20 years old at the time of the accusations, for the incidents.
The 2022 Junior World Championship, which was postponed in December because of Covid disruptions, will begin on Tuesday in the Alberta cities of Edmonton and Red Deer.
Mr. Cromwell’s investigation, which Hockey Canada said will start immediately, is one of a series that have been launched in recent weeks.
Last month, Hockey Canada announced that it would bring in an independent reviewer to determine what happened between an unnamed woman and players in London, Ontario, in 2018. Those finding will be reviewed by a panel of current and retired judges who will impose penalties that could include lifetime suspensions from the sport for players.
The police force in London, a city southwest of Toronto, has also reopened a criminal investigation into the 2018 episode.
“These revelations demonstrate a deep, toxic culture that allows people to act with impunity,” Pascale St-Onge, the country’s sports minister, told a House of Commons committee during a hearing in which she questioned the fitness of the governing body’s current management. “We know we have not done enough to address the actions of some members of the 2018 National Junior Team, or to end the culture of toxic behavior within our game. Hockey Canada, the whole country is watching.”
Ms. St.-Onge added that she will not accept “just a P.R. exercise” from Hockey Canada and urged the organization to also review racism with in the sport, as well has how it handles on-ice violence and concussions. Several weeks ago she ordered an audit to determine if any government money was used for out of court settlements. The government provides about six percent of Hockey Canada’s revenue.
Hockey Canada has apologized to Canadians in an unsigned statement.
“We have heard Canadians loud and clear and are committed to making the changes necessary to allow us to be the organization Canadians expect,” the statement said.
“We know we have not done enough to address the actions of some members of the 2018 National Junior Team or to end the culture of toxic behavior within our game,” it added. “We know we need to do more to address the behaviors, on and off the ice, that conflict with what Canadians want hockey to be, and which undermine the many good things that the game brings to our country.”
The review by Mr. Cromwell and two lawyers will not focus on the behavior of players, coaches and staff whether on or off the ice. Instead it will look into issues like whether there is sufficient control over how money is dispensed from a “national equity fund” that had been use to settle lawsuits, and whether Hockey Canada’s volunteer board of directors adequately oversees operations.
The inquiry will also examine Hockey Canada’s bylaws and management structure and provide interim findings and recommendations by November.
“What residential school was, and still is, is a nightmare.” For more than a century, Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their homes and sent to residential schools to forcibly assimilate them into white society. And thousands were never seen again. Now, more than 20 years after the last school shut down, searches for the remains of these lost children are happening across the country. “There’s nothing on the surface, but once we interpret the data, we can see if we can find these children.” We followed a team of archaeologists who came to the Muskowekwan First Nation to investigate what lies beneath the ground. “There is unmarked graves there. They’re all over the place. But nothing has been done.” Here, some residential school survivors hope that scientific evidence will reveal to the rest of the world a truth they’ve long known. “These stories are real. I saw something in here. And people have never listened.” Harvey Desjarlais was taken to residential school when he was 6 1/2 years old. “And I remember being locked in the dorm. I cried so much because of the harshness. Small boys’ dorm — this is where we were kept. They shave your head, cut off your braids. Right here, a boy hung himself. I found him hanging. He wasn’ t hanging. He was laying there. He was already —” Generations of Indigenous children suffered physical and sexual abuse inside the boarding schools. They were established by the Canadian government and initially run by the Catholic Church. “This used to be the chapel over here. This is where we used to pray 10 times a day. They used to call us little savages. ‘You little savage. Your ceremonies, that’s paganism.’ That’s how they spoke to us.” After his years as a student, Harvey worked as the school’s caretaker for 22 years. Today, he still visits the grounds of the former school, even though it shut down in 1997. “I come here just about every day. I have a dream of elders. You know, like calling. And I know what they’re calling about. They’re our children.” “You look at your map. And you could just draw a circle so we could find out exactly where these graves are.” The First Nation has invited archaeologists to search for unmarked graves, and survivor testimony will be crucial. Elders have long shared stories of what happened at these schools but were rarely believed outside their community. “We lived on top of the graves for many, many years. But we couldn’t do nothing. There’s a big hill over here — all graves, all graves.” “About the researchers coming here, it’s been a long time coming.” Laura Oochoo is Harvey’s longtime partner. She also went to the Muskowekwan Residential School. “I’m at a place where I’m trying to understand, what’s this all mean for — for all of us right now? People are angry with the finding of our kids. This horror, it’s living with that. They deserve to be honored and respected, you know? That’s all I think that they would want.” “I’m very confident that there is something there.” The archaeologists Terence Clark and Kisha Supernant are leading the search effort. They’re using ground-penetrating radar to locate burial sites. The rest of the team is made up of graduate students, including Micaela Champagne, who, along with Kisha, is Indigenous. “So I’ve been an archaeologist now for about 20 years. And with Indigenous communities, they would prefer, often, to have less destructive methods, so ways to not disturb a lot of earth. So there’s a bunch of them. And that’s a 3-year-old.” “And it’s all in the same year.” “The work that we’re doing with the ground-penetrating radar is to locate children’s graves. And before we really get into that, we need to understand how many children we’re looking for.” Many of the records from this era are incomplete or have been destroyed, but the documents that remain contain clues to some deaths and abuses. “There’s a couple sort of suspicious-y ones that are, like, 14 years old.” “Babies, it’s babies.” Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated residential schools, and in a 2015 report, concluded that many children died from malnourishment, disease and suicide. “This was a deliberate act to colonize, ‘to extinguish the Indian in the child.’ That’s a direct quote.” “The mastery of words.” “This was planned, it was callous, and abuse and death were known about.” “I was gang-raped by a gang in the school, you know? And after I went through all the turmoil of sexual assault, I became suicidal in school. I was 12 years old when I tried to commit suicide. A lot of us that came out of that school had a hard time.” Harvey’s come to the school to show researchers where to look in person. “My name’s Harvey.” “I’m Terry.” “I was here since 1949.” “Wow.” “I went to school here 17 years, and I worked here another 22 years. From here, all the way this way, it has to be looked at. There was bodies all along, up to about the bottom, where the line is about there, just maybe past there.” “OK.” “All right, let’s maybe put it all down, and we’ll smudge before I put anything in the ground here.” “Sounds good.” “Archaeology has a very dark past about stealing Indigenous remains. And there was something in me that was telling me that this is something that I have to be a part of. The equipment’s actually quite heavy. It’s kind of representative of helping to shoulder some of that weight from those communities.” “So the ground-penetrating radar basically takes a electromagnetic wave and sends it down to the ground from a sensor at a particular frequency. So the higher the frequency, the tighter the wave. And it sends that down. And it’s basically measuring what’s reflected back.” After scanning the ground for four days, the team processes the data and stitches it together in 3D to see if the resulting images show any signs of children’s remains. “From four and a half to seven and a half, there’s just a lot of stuff something going on.” “Something going on there, yeah.” “This is the type of shape that we have found. The color pattern, you can almost imagine a child lying on its side in that pit. We’ve had survivors tell us to look in this spot. There’s no other sort of natural phenomenon to explain why you’d have this oval pit underneath the surface. And then the fact that there are eight to 10 or 12, all of those things together, um, yeah.” “It’s about as certain as we can get. “Yeah.” “That’s heartbreaking.” “This is why we do it. It’s just — it shows the value of what we’re doing.” “And there’s thousands of these across the country. Thousands. People deserve answers, and they deserve justice.” This time, they’ve discovered two unmarked graves. But researchers say they expect to find over 80 more at Muskowekwan. They still have large swaths of land around the school left to scan. “It’s in our traditional belief that our ancestors are constantly walking beside us and with us to give us strength. We turned a corner, and there was the boiler room. The boiler room was used as a way to get rid of some of the remains and children. It was difficult, but I also needed to understand, as a granddaughter of a survivor, what she went through.” “We’re supposed to be these objective scientists, but there are these moments of emotion. Sometimes they’re joy, sometimes they’re sorrow, and everything in between.” “Underneath that grief and everything, you can sometimes feel relief.” After the ground sonar identifies where bodies might be buried, the First Nation hopes to have a traditional feast and ceremony to honor the children who died at the school. The next step is for the community to decide whether they want to unearth the remains. “Do you think that all this is giving closure to the era of residential school? I think so.” “I think so, yeah.” “It’s making the choice to heal away from the trauma, the abuse. We know who we are. We come from this Creator-given land. That’s who we are.”
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Canadian police reported multiple shootings of homeless people Monday in a Vancouver suburb and said a suspect was in custody.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said most of the shootings were in downtown Langley. One reported shooting was in neighboring Langley Township.
Police Sgt. Rebecca Parslow said she had no immediate details on the victims' conditions.
Mounties issued a cellphone alert about 6:30 a.m., telling people to avoid the area.
Police closed off a main route through the center of the city. Authorities later issued a cellphone alert saying the suspect was in custody.
Authorities initially said they were unsure if the shooter acted alone. But police later said the man in custody is believed to be solely responsible.
A homicide team confirmed on social media that its investigators deployed to Langley to help the mounted police.
Yellow police tape surrounded a sandwich shop and a parking lot in Langley at the scene of one of the shootings. A black tent was set up over one of the crime scenes.
Langley is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Vancouver.
Mass shootings are less common in Canada than in the United States. The deadliest gun rampage in Canadian history happened in 2020 when a man disguised as a police officer shot people in their homes and set fires across the province of Nova Scotia, killing 22 people.
The country overhauled its gun-control laws after an attacker named Marc Lepine killed 14 women and himself in 1989 at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique college.
It is now illegal to possess an unregistered handgun or any kind of rapid-fire weapon in Canada. To purchase a weapon, the country also requires training, a personal risk assessment, two references, spousal notification and criminal record checks.
Pope Francis has arrived in Canada, where he is expected to personally apologise to Indigenous survivors of abuse committed over a span of decades at residential schools run by the Catholic Church.
The head of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics landed at Edmonton's international airport shortly after 11 am (1700 GMT) on Sunday, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcoming him in an airport ceremony that began with the playing of Native American drums.
During the 10-hour flight from Rome Francis told journalists travelling with him that "we must be aware that this is a penitential journey."
The 85-year-old pontiff's Canada visit is primarily to apologize to survivors for the Church's role in the scandal that a national truth and reconciliation commission has called "cultural genocide".
From the late 1800s to the 1990s, Canada's government sent about 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children into 139 residential schools run by the Church, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
Many were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers.
Thousands of children are believed to have died of disease, malnutrition or neglect.
READ MORE: Explained: Canada’s 'cultural genocide' of Indigenous people
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KixTog29o_c[/embed]
'Too late'
Since May 2021, more than 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered at the sites of the former schools.
A delegation of Indigenous peoples travelled to the Vatican in April and met with the pope — a precursor to Francis' six-day trip.
In the community of Maskwacis, some 100 kilometres south of Edmonton, the pope will address an estimated crowd of 15,000 expected to include former students from across the country.
Some see the pope's visit as too little too late, including Linda McGilvery with the Saddle Lake Cree Nation near Saint Paul, about 200 kilometres east of Edmonton.
"For me it's kind of too late, because a lot of the people suffered, and the priests and the nuns have now passed on," said the 68-year-old who spent eight years of her childhood in one of the schools.
"Being in the residential school I lost a lot of my culture, my ancestry. That's many years of loss," she told AFP news agency.
READ MORE: Pope apologises to Canadian indigenous for abuses
Source: TRTWorld and agencies
Pope Francis is travelling to Canada for a chance to personally apologise to Indigenous survivors of abuse committed over a span of decades at residential schools run by the Catholic Church.
The head of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics will be met at Edmonton's international airport by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after the flight from Rome on Sunday.
The 10-hour flight constitutes the longest since 2019 for the 85-year-old pope, who has been suffering from knee pain that has forced him to use a cane or wheelchair in recent outings.
Francis' Canada visit — which he has called a "penitential pilgrimage" of "healing and reconciliation" — is primarily to apologise to survivors for the Church's role in the scandal that a national truth and reconciliation commission has called "cultural genocide".
From the late 1800s to the 1990s, Canada's government sent about 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children into 139 residential schools run by the Church, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
Many were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers. Thousands of children are believed to have died of disease, malnutrition or neglect.
READ MORE: Explained: Canada’s 'cultural genocide' of Indigenous people
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KixTog29o_c[/embed]
'Too late'
Since May 2021, more than 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered at the sites of the former schools.
A delegation of Indigenous peoples travelled to the Vatican in April and met with the pope — a precursor to Francis' six-day trip.
In the community of Maskwacis, some 100 kilometres south of Edmonton, the pope will address an estimated crowd of 15,000 expected to include former students from across the country.
Some see the pope's visit as too little too late, including Linda McGilvery with the Saddle Lake Cree Nation near Saint Paul, about 200 kilometres east of Edmonton.
"For me it's kind of too late, because a lot of the people suffered, and the priests and the nuns have now passed on," said the 68-year-old who spent eight years of her childhood in one of the schools.
"Being in the residential school I lost a lot of my culture, my ancestry. That's many years of loss," she told AFP news agency.
READ MORE: Pope apologises to Canadian indigenous for abuses
Source: TRTWorld and agencies
