Lawyers for the chief adjudicator of the Independent Assessment Process were in a Manitoba courtroom last Friday as part of an effort to protect the rights of Indian residential school survivors.
Dan Shapiro is seeking the court’s assistance to protect residential school claimants against unscrupulous form filling agencies and the lawyers that use them.
Shapiro says these agencies are not regulated under the residential school settlement agreement and often charge claimants twice what they would otherwise normally pay.
“Our process is about redressing historic wrongs and certainly not about creating new injustices to people and that is a concern that I have and I shared with the court,” he says.
The chief adjudicator adds for this reason he has asked the court to provide some protection to claimants against these agencies.
“What we are asking the court to do is to rule that these kinds of arrangements are unenforceable. So that if claimants have signed an agreement to pay a fee to a form filling agency, that the court would declare and direct that they’re not obligated to pay that.”
The court hearing was in Winnipeg.