Victims feel like they bared it all, for nothing

Cornwall Standard Freeholder

15 March 2008

Posted By Trevor Pritchard

In the days after Andre Bissonnette left the witness stand at the Cornwall Public Inquiry last May, he got a phone call from his daughter.

Both she and her boyfriend had spent the last four hours reading the transcripts of his testimony - the stories of how, as a 14-year-old boy in 1963, he was sexually assaulted by another teen while in foster care, and later shipped off to an infamous reform school in Alfred, Ont.

And both his daughter and her boyfriend, recalled Bissonnette, had been reduced to tears by those stories.

"She was proud. That assured me that I did the right thing," said the Ottawa native, whose pride turned to devastation two weeks ago when he learned his testimony would not be used by the commission to find fault against the Children's Aid Society.

"(Now) I feel like I've been re-victimized."

A January 2008 ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal had forced inquiry commissioner Normand Glaude to reconsider the limits of his mandate to probe into historical allegations of abuse in the Cornwall area.

Lawyers for the Ontario Provincial Police had approached the appeal court in 2007, seeking that a lower court's ruling which allowed Glaude to hear the testimony of two witnesses, C-12 and C-13, be overturned.

C-12 was 16 when, in 1993, she was allegedly raped by two other teens. She and her mother, C-13, wanted to testify about how they felt OPP officers in Alexandria mishandled their case.

After the appeal court ruled C-12's complaint fell outside the inquiry's mandate, lawyers for the Cornwall Community Police Service, the CAS, and two alleged abusers came forward with the names of 17 witnesses whose previous testimony, they argued, was similarly irrelevant.

Glaude ruled on Feb. 28 that the testimony of 14 of those 17 would not be touched. But there were three exceptions: Larry Seguin (the first victim to appear at the inquiry), Seguin's mother Juliette, and Bissonnette.

The allegations of those three, Glaude decided, did not fit the newly-refined mandate because the people they accused weren't in positions of trust or authority.

Advertisement

It was with "great reluctance," Glaude wrote in his 36-page decision, that he could not use Bissonnette's testimony to make any findings of misconduct against the CAS. Nor would the CAS have to respond to any of Bissonnette's allegations. Bissonnette, 59, remembered the shock he felt when the ruling was handed down.

"I had this moment where I wanted to quit therapy, quit everything and just hide," he said. "I even thought about throwing away my sobriety when I heard the news - thank God I didn't."

After leaving foster care when he turned 16, Bissonnette spent a good part of the next three decades in an alcoholic haze.

He testified at the inquiry that six months before his time in foster care was up, the CAS transferred him to the St. Joseph's Training School in Alfred. In that short time, he said, he was drugged and assaulted, both physically and sexually.

The school became infamous in the 1990s after hundreds of former residents came forward and alleged they were repeatedly abused by the Roman Catholic brothers in charge.

Sober for eight years this September, Bissonnette now spends most of his time taking care of a brother who lives in an Ottawa nursing home. A car accident a few years ago means the father-of-three gets by with money from his disability pension.

It took six to seven months of counselling, he said, before he was strong enough to tell the public what he went through.

"I thought (that by) coming forward, other people might come forward. And I felt good afterward," said Bissonnette.

"But there's also healing in justice. And I don't feel like I'll get that."

Lori Harreman, Bissonnette's lawyer, tried to argue that the age of her client's abuser shouldn't have been the commission's deciding factor.

"There was an act of sexual abuse. It (happened) in a CAS context," said Harreman on Thursday.

"In other words, the only reason Andre‚ was there was because he was a ward of the CAS."

His testimony would also be relevant if the CAS knew about the abuses that were taking place in Alfred and still shipped its children there - an area that Bissonnette wasn't allowed to explore in detail, Harreman said, when he was on the stand.

Yet it's difficult for a party without standing at the inquiry to appeal the commission's decision, she added, unless the commission itself decided to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The 60-day window to contest the appeal court's Jan. 18 decision runs out on Tuesday, and according to commission counsel Pierre Dumais, Glaude's compromise seems to have satisfied most of the parties with standing.

"In theory, we could still appeal," said Dumais. "But it doesn't look like we're going to go that route."

Glaude did conclude that the testimony of Bissonnette and the Seguins was "reasonably relevant" to the inquiry's mandate, said Dumais. That means that while Glaude can't force the institutions to respond to their evidence, their testimony can be used to better understand how sexual abuse affects young people, he explained.

"I think the commissioner was being very mindful (of the importance of their evidence) when he was making his decision," said Dumais. "He was trying to be as inclusive as he was legally able to do so."

That mindfulness isn't enough for Seguin, who in October 2006 took the stand on his 35th birthday.

Seguin testified that one day in 1978, when he was six years old, he was running an errand for his mother when a stranger pulled him into his car and sexually assaulted him.

Now 36, Seguin says he appeared at the inquiry partly so that he could finally get answers from the Cornwall police. He wanted to know why they never laid charges against his alleged abuser, even after he found the man's car parked near his home one year later.

Before he could get those answers, the force's lawyers successfully argued that - as was the case with Bissonnette - the man Seguin had accused of abusing him was not in a position of authority.

In the years following his abuse (he also testified that when he was 16, he was sexually assaulted at knifepoint by a friend of his brother) Seguin fell into a life of crime. He began smoking pot at 10, graduated to harder drugs, and stole to keep his habit going.

His distrust of police - which stemmed from that first assault - certainly didn't help matters.

"I would see a cop car, I would put nails in the tires," recalled Seguin.

"I remember doing that when I was nine or 10 years old."

Today, Seguin works as an energy consultant in Cornwall, and is doing his best to stay clean. He still can't fathom, however, why police officials would say they welcome an inquiry and then slam the door shut on his testimony.

"What really angers me is, why are they not willing to answer the questions? Why are they trying to hide the mistakes they made?" said Seguin.

"Everyone makes mistakes. Just own up to it and better yourself as a police force."

As for Bissonnette, he's still in therapy, trying to deal with both his abuse and the impact of the commissioner's ruling.

"That day I gave evidence was the hardest thing I ever had to do," he said.

"I didn't want to, but I thought that I'd have my day."