Glaude to decide on blocking documents


Cornwall Standard Freeholder

 Local News - Thursday, May 10, 2007 @ 08:00  

Terri Saunders

The judge at the helm of the Cornwall Public Inquiry is trying to figure out if he has any right to block the release of OPP documents to a man suing the local Catholic diocese.

Comm. Normand Glaude heard arguments Tuesday as to whether or not he has the jurisdiction to prohibit the documents - which have been made a part of disclosure at the inquiry and are therefore subject to confidentiality orders - from being handed over to lawyers for Albert Lalonde.

A member of The Victims Group, a party with standing at the inquiry, Lalonde alleges he was sexually abused for two years as a child by Rev. Charles MacDonald. The priest has denied all allegations against him and criminal charges laid in 1996 were stayed in 2002 when a judge determined it had taken too long to bring the matter to trial.

Lalonde recently launched a civil suit against the Alexandria-Cornwall Roman Catholic Diocese, suggesting diocese officials not only knew the abuse occurred but did nothing to prevent it from happening and did nothing to help Lalonde cope with the affects of the alleged abuse.

His lawyers are seeking the release of 46 documents, including numerous statements Lalonde gave to police, correspondence between police officers and Crown attorneys and notes compiled by OPP officers assigned to Project Truth, a four-year investigation into historical sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the Cornwall area.

In order to obtain the documents, Lalonde's lawyers have filed a request under the province's Freedom of Information Act.

Lawyers for the OPP and the Ministry of the Attorney General have suggested the documents may be prohibited from being released due to the fact they are now under the control of the inquiry.

In advance of the hearings, and in the months since they began in February 2006, documents poured into the commission's offices as parties were asked to disclose all sorts of statements, notes and papers related to decades of police investigations into allegations of abuse and institutional response to those allegations.

Of particular note has been the documents provided to the commission related to Project Truth, a task which has proven costly and took months to achieve.

Gina Brannan, an attorney for the OPP, has asked Glaude to consider whether the documents can be released as part of the FOI request.

"Maybe we were like the child where the father was telling the child to do one thing and the mother the other, and the child is sitting there saying, 'What do I do?'" said Brannan. "I think that's where the Ontario Provincial Police are right now. We do not want to breach the Freedom of Information legislation but at the same time we want to be certain that we are not in breach of the summons or the undertaking (at the inquiry.)"

Of the hundreds of thousands of pages of disclosure received by the commission, only a few thousand have actually been entered as exhibits.

Parties at the hearings have all signed undertakings which prohibit them from making public any of the disclosed documents which have not yet become a part of the public record.

Lalonde has not yet testified at the inquiry, so the bulk of documents related to his allegations remain protected by Glaude's order.

Glaude has indicated he will consider the issue and return with comments sometime in the near future.

The inquiry will continue today when it's expected an alleged victim of child sexual abuse will take the stand.  

F-O-I Act VS Inquiry Act

May 09, 2007 — The OPP are looking for some direction from the commissioner at the Cornwall Public Inquiry. The OPP has been asked to hand over some documents for a separate case through the Freedom of Information Act. However, an inquiry paper states the information obtained by the inquiry is for inquiry purposes only. Some lawyers made presentations to Justice Normand Glaude saying government documents on file before the inquiry started should be accesssible through F-O-I. There are some questions on how to handle documents that surfaced because of the inquiry. OPP lawyer Gina Brannan tells AM 1220 News the inquiry and F-O-I are two different processes. Glaude will make his ruling at a later date.
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