B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma responds to questions outside B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on Nov. 27, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Lorraine Walton never wanted for food growing up in the B.C.’s Kootenays region in the 1970s: Her mom and dad made sure their pantry was bursting and their root cellar was full of local fruits and vegetables, either grown or gathered and then canned by the family.
She says the overabundance was her father’s response to the trauma of being starved as a child during a five-year detention at a provincial residential school, where the treatment was so bad he was beaten for hiding scraps of bread under his mattress.
Her parents, now deceased, were two of roughly 200 children seized in the 1950s from their parents in southeastern British Columbia and sent to the New Denver residential school by the province after their sect, known as the Sons of Freedom, refused to send them to public school. The tiny group had broken away from Canada’s Doukhobor population, a religious group that settled in the region and Saskatchewan after they were banished from Russia in the late 19th century for their pacifist views, rejection of the Orthodox Church and refusal to participate in the military.
These survivors and their children, like Ms. Walton, have spent decades asking for apologies and compensation from the province – requests that repeatedly failed.
Until now.
B.C. Attorney-General Niki Sharma’s office confirmed a public apology to the survivors, who may number about 75, and their families will be made Thursday in Castlegar. A corresponding proposal for financial reparations is expected by the descendants of the Sons of Freedom community.
“They really need to address the personal compensation package – not just looking at leaving a legacy. These children suffered between ‘53 and ‘59, they were mentally, physically and some were sexually abused,” Ms. Walton said as she visited the site of the meeting to drop off salt, water and bread, three essential ceremonial accompaniments to traditional Doukhobor services.
“They need to right the wrong of what occurred 71 years ago,” she said. “It’s much too late for people like my parents, but we know that they will be there with us in spirit and through us they will hear this apology.”
Ms. Walton, a long-time advocate for survivors and their families, said there is palpable anxiety about the province’s actions after Premier David Eby’s office aborted a plan to apologize in the legislature at the last minute in November.
The province committed to apologizing last summer after B.C. Ombudsperson Jay Chalke issued a scathing report on the inaction by successive governments over the years.
Mr. Chalke wrote the report after touring the province in the summer of 2022 and meeting with advocates for the survivors, including Ms. Walton, who said she was inspired to seek redress after the settlements with First Nations survivors of the Indian Residential School system.
On Wednesday, Mr. Chalke said the government’s apology needs to be “unconditional, clear and public.”
He said he has also communicated to the Attorney-General that the wider community needs to be compensated, as well as the individuals who were sent to the New Denver residential school and their progeny.
“Clearly there has been intergenerational trauma from the events that happened in the 1950s and I don’t think government should be seen to have the amount of compensation they pay reduced through their own delay,” he said in a phone interview.
Last summer, his report found many of the children were mistreated physically and psychologically between 1953 and 1959 while placed in a former tuberculosis sanatorium at New Denver.
The families were targeted because some of their members used bombings, arson and nudity to protest against the government’s intrusion into their lives. In 1953, the province began capturing them after it invoked the Protection of Children Act, which police used to apprehend anyone under 18 who was not enrolled in school.
On Sept. 9 of that year, the RCMP arrested Sons of Freedom adults for parading nude near a school. They also seized 104 children and took them to the New Denver school, located about 100 kilometres north of Castlegar. Most didn’t know any English, but they were not allowed to speak Russian. Parents were allowed one-hour visits every two weeks; those visits included prayer meetings, which cut into the time parents could spend with the children.
Ms. Walton said she remembers revisiting the site with her family for a beach picnic when her dad, in his mid-30s, broke down.
“He said, ‘They promised us that if we behaved, the boat would come down this water and take us home and it never came.’”
With a report from The Canadian Press