Survivors taken to the bank
Form-filling company representatives forced fees from settlement cheques
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Published Monday, May 19, 2014
IQALUIT
A Nunavut lawyer is sounding the alarm about unscrupulous form-filling companies who are charging fees to residential school survivors seeking settlements.
Sandra Omik, legal counsel for Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., which is a party to to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, said she became aware of the form-filling practice several years ago.
"I became concerned when I looked into my mail box and found mass advertising posters. They used words like, 'You can be further compensated with more cash,' which made me very uncomfortable."
Omik started investigating. Her search led her to a form-filling company linked to a law firm in Alberta.
"I wanted to see if it was legit," she said. But she soon learned that "they siphon off people. They take advantage of elderly, unilingual Inuit who know nothing about the legal process."
Omik soon realized there were many such companies across Canada.
She said there were two court ordered "reprimands" in the past but she hopes the Manitoba case would finally cease the form-filling practices completely instead of just dealing with specific firms.
Two settlement agreement claimants recounted their stories about being forced to pay fees to a company who filled out their forms, in a pilot case heard in a Manitoba court April 25.
According to court documents, Claimant #1, an elderly woman, whose name cannot be released because of a publication ban, was sick from cancer and chemotherapy when she was forced to travel by bus from her home in northern Ontario to Winnipeg to receive her settlement cheque.
An employee of the form-filling company and an unidentified man walked the claimant to the bank.
"We went to the bank," she stated in an affidavit. "I had to walk a long ways with the cheque, and they were, you know, they weren't really waiting up for me or anything. I was trying to keep up with them as best as I could. I asked if I could sit down, at the bank, because I was walking on wobbly legs. I was feeling weak."
At the bank, the company employee instructed the teller to take thousands from the claimant's cheque. Claimant #1 surrendered the fee, the court documents state.
Claimant #2, a 72-year-old man, has a similar story. A Winnipeg lawyer refused to mail him the settlement cheque, and he had to travel to Winnipeg from his fly-in community by borrowing money from his band. Once he had his cheque, a representative of the form-filling company followed him from the lawyer's building, from bank to bank, even jumping into a taxi with him, until he finally agreed to sign a bank draft for $6,667.35.
Dan Shapiro, chief adjudicator of the Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat, said he cannot allow this appalling behaviour to continue.
"It is not appropriate to sit idly by when the integrity of the process and the full benefit of settlements is in question," said Shapiro.
According to Shapiro, in the case of claimant #1 and #2, the lawyer returned the money taken by the form-filling company and he denies knowledge of any of his other 480 or so residential school settlement clients being charged such fees.
Nunavut lawyer Steve Cooper, who has been involved with the residential school claims process since 1997, said that by 2007 - the implementation date for the settlement agreement was September 2007 - "form fillers started to spring up very quickly. They were a background story almost from the get-go."
Number of residential school survivors making claims
- Anticipated number of claimants nation-wide: 12,500
- Actual number of claimants nationwide: 37,922
- Claimants in Nunavut: 515
- Resolved Nunavut claims: 273
- Nunavut claims still in process: 242
- Anticipated date of completion: 2016
Source: Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat
Resources for claimants
Indian Residential School Adjudication Secretariat
- 24-hour crisis line: 1-866-925-4419
- Info line: 1-877-635-2648
Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
- Toll free: 1-888-646-0006
- Iqaluit: 1-867-975-4900
Law Society of Nunavut
Source: Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat
