John Furlong’s Accusers Finally Will Get a Hearing

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has announced tentative dates for an inquiry into the RCMP’s handling of abuse allegations by Indigenous day school survivors against former Vancouver Olympics CEO John Furlong.

The six-week hearing is expected to begin Jan. 10. It will mark the first time since the allegations surfaced nine years ago that survivors of Immaculata Elementary School in Burns Lake will have the chance to tell their stories to a court or tribunal.

And while a decision hasn’t been made on whether the hearing will be virtual or in-person, it is expected to be held in northern B.C.

The alleged abuses took place more than 50 years ago and were initially made public in a September 2012 article in the Georgia Straight by Ontario-based journalist Laura Robinson, after she discovered discrepancies in Furlong’s 2011 biography, Patriot Hearts.

In his biography, Furlong spoke about arriving in Canada in 1974 to teach physical education in Prince George. Robinson learned he had actually arrived in Canada five years earlier, as a missionary and coach at Immaculata, a Catholic school in Burns Lake, and later at Prince George College.

In the article, which drew from affidavits obtained from seven members of the Lake Babine Nation and one from the Burns Lake Band who attended Immaculata, the former coach is accused of physical and mental abuse.

Two months before the article was published, in July 2012, one of Furlong’s accusers also took her story, which included allegations of sexual abuse, to the RCMP in Burns Lake. The investigation wrapped up two years later without charges, concluding that the recollections of those interviewed lacked “details for time, place, identity of suspect, and any corroborating events that could possibly overcome these deficiencies,” according to documents filed by the complainants.

Furlong has never been charged or successfully sued in connection with any of the allegations.

The allegations of sexual abuse didn’t become public until after the Georgia Straight article was published, brought up by Furlong himself at a press conference held later that day where he denied accusations of both physical and sexual abuse, calling them “completely without merit.”

“I believe that the RCMP, in looking into this matter, will discredit the complaint entirely because it just didn’t happen,” Furlong said at the time. “Because of the gravity of the situation I encourage the police to continue to investigate the allegations and especially how they were arrived at.”

According to the six Lake Babine Nation members who filed the human rights complaint, the allegations were not thoroughly investigated.

In a statement of particulars filed in June 2020 with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, the complainants say that investigators’ “stereotypes and biased attitudes” and inability to accommodate Indigenous peoples’ historic distrust of RCMP or take into account intergenerational trauma resulted in a flawed investigation.

The complainants claim discrimination by RCMP resulted in denial of access to police services based on race, contrary to the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Their experience “represents the experiences of many other Indigenous people nationwide,” according to the statement, and shows how Indigenous victims of abuse suffer adverse impacts being “disbelieved, dehumanized and discarded as unworthy of proper police investigation services.”

“Bias in favour of powerful non-Indigenous individuals, even if unconsciously held, results in harmful treatment to Indigenous complainants of abuse,” it says. “This dehumanization has resulted in their psychological, emotional and spiritual harm.”

According to the filing, the day after Furlong’s sexual abuse accuser came forward in July 2012, an internal RCMP email noted that the allegations could be “an embarrassment at a number of levels of government” as the 2012 Summer Olympics were about to get underway in London. Furlong had been in charge of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

“Should the allegation(s) be substantiated, the entire matter will likely be linked to the greater issue of First Nations and Native Residential Schools,” a Vancouver-based senior officer working with the Integrated Security Unit during the Vancouver Olympics said in the email, according to the statement.

In a response filed by RCMP in September, the force says it “undertook a thorough and careful investigation” into the sexual assault allegations, which included a review by an RCMP serious crime unit in Alberta after a draft report was submitted in June 2013.

The review made 28 recommendations that focused on more general claims of physical abuse at Immaculata, the response says, prompting RCMP to set up a separate file to investigate those statements. There was no investigation into Furlong’s time at Prince George College because RCMP received no complaints about abuses at the facility, it says.

One recommendation from the Alberta RCMP unit was to interview Furlong, who had previously only provided a statement.

That never happened, because of “absent corroborating evidence or reasonable grounds to support the alleged crimes,” the RCMP response says, despite investigators interviewing Furlong’s accuser “several times to determine the consistency of her recollections.”

Another recommendation, according to the complainants’ original statement, was to “consider a polygraph” for Furlong. That never happened despite an RCMP officer trying 11 times to have Furlong’s accuser take the lie-detector test, the statement says.

In total, RCMP interviewed the alleged sexual assault victim three times, contacted 37 witnesses and obtained school records from Immaculata, the force says in its response. Ultimately, it suggested the complaint be dismissed entirely.

“Many of the complaints against the investigation as a whole misunderstand the structure of the criminal justice system and cannot be evidence of discrimination,” the RCMP response reads, adding that remedies proposed by the complainants would “significantly encroach onto police officers’ professional discretion and the executive’s role in administering the criminal justice system.

“This tribunal should dismiss this complaint.”

Frank Alec, a Lake Babine Nation member who also holds the Wet’suwet’en hereditary name Chief Woos, attended Immaculata as a day student and, later, Lejac Residential School. Alec will be a witness at the inquiry and says it’s exactly those RCMP structures that need to be examined.

He says the Canadian justice system fails Indigenous people by not recognizing unique cultural traditions of justice, which include land-based healing, humility and wiggus, or respect. He says that has led to Indigenous people being over-represented in the criminal justice system.

“Time goes on and, all of a sudden, our values have diminished, our respect diminished, trust diminished, and we rely mostly on the justice system that’s in the courts right now. It just made things worse,” he says.

“At this point, the reality is that we have a lot of people that are institutionalized. We have a lot of people that are incarcerated right now, we have a lot of people that were incarcerated, and we have that much more work to catch up with to realize our wiggus.”

Whether the inquiry will mark a turning point in the conversation about past wrongs committed against Indigenous people — and recent recognition generally about the harms of residential schools — remains to be seen, Alec says.

The inquiry comes at a time of reckoning for residential school survivors, who have long alleged abuses at the facilities designed to assimilate Indigenous children, separating them from their families and their culture. In total, more than 1,000 unmarked graves have been discovered at the former institutions since late May.

On July 27, Manitoba RCMP announced it had launched a criminal investigation in 2011 into sexual abuse allegations at Fort Alexander Residential School, which operated from 1905 to 1970 near Sagkeeng First Nation.

The investigation involved more than 80 officers who interacted with more than 700 people, including Chief and council of Sagkeeng First Nation, it said. Investigators also reviewed archival records in both Manitoba and Ottawa in an attempt to identify anyone involved, it said, and 75 witness and victim statements obtained by police.

The results of that investigation are awaiting review by the Manitoba Prosecution Service, it added.

Despite several civil lawsuits launched as a result of the Furlong allegations, Immaculata survivors have never had the opportunity to take the stand and tell their stories.

Furlong dropped his defamation suit against Robinson in 2015 after three separate lawsuits filed against him by former students were dismissed or withdrawn.

A counter defamation suit filed against Furlong by Robinson did not allow testimony from those accusing Furlong of abuse. Instead, the court heard from a memory expert who forwarded the theory that Robinson’s interviewing techniques had planted memories of abuse.

Robinson’s claim was dismissed.

The upcoming inquiry into the RCMP investigation of the Furlong case will be heard by tribunal chair David Thomas. It is tentatively scheduled to run from Jan. 10 to 28, break for two weeks, and resume from Feb. 21 to March 11.

A decision about whether the hearing will be virtual or in-person is expected in late October, CHRT acting executive director Lydia M. Tonelli said in an email to The Tyee.

The complainants are seeking an apology from the RCMP and an independent investigation, overseen by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, into complaints by anyone who attended schools in the Roman Catholic Prince Rupert diocese.

They are asking the investigative team include Indigenous community members, someone trained in abuse investigations, someone trained in trauma and mental health and a spiritual advisor.

The complainants also seek $40,000 for any individual abused at schools within the diocese.

Finally, the complainants seek “systemic remedies” to discriminatory investigative practices within the RCMP, including an Indigenous-run special investigation program.

A decision is expected within four months of the hearing, according to the CHRT. Anyone disputing the tribunal’s decision has 30 days to file an application for judicial review with the Federal Court of Canada.