'Mixed' feelings after residential school survivors met with Ontario law society, advocate says

A residential school survivor and long-time social justice advocate in northwestern Ontario says he had "mixed" feelings after leaving a meeting held last week in Lac Seul First Nation with the Law Society of Ontario.

The meeting was so the regulator of the legal profession in the province could share the results of a review it undertook into how the law society deals with Indigenous people who file complaints against lawyers. The report stated the regulatory body needs to be more "culturally competent" moving forward, and made several recommendations for change.

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"[They were] difficult discussions but what needed to be said was said," Garnet Angeconeb told CBC News. "Hopefully we move forward in a way that we can improve in how Indigenous issues are dealt with by the law society."

"Again, difficult but much-needed dialogue happened on Monday."

The law society's look at itself and its pledges to change came after the regulator's probe into the conduct of Kenora lawyer Doug Keshen, who was accused by more than a dozen residential school survivors of mishandling their claims received from Canada's Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Those hearings stopped in 2017 when Keshen and the law society agreed to participate in a separate process. Through it, the parties came to a mutual agreement for Keshen to have his work regularly reviewed by the law society.

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Keshen has denied any misconduct in the way he handled claimants' files and has not agreed with the idea he made mistakes worthy of discipline.

Angeconeb said it was good to hear at Monday's meeting in Lac Seul that the society is working to improve, but was disappointed that survivors who filed complaints with the regulator still have few answers as to why misconduct hearings suddenly came to a halt.

He said that the language and processes used during the misconduct hearings were very technical, legal and didn't give survivors an appropriate way to be heard.

"I left feeling disappointed for the people who had lodged complaints ... the tribunal collapsed and there were really no concrete answers," he said. Angeconeb was not a complainant in the case against Keshen but was close with some of the survivors who had testified against him.

"You heard and you felt a lot of anger, you felt a lot of sadness and you felt a lot of hurt survivors again," he said. "It left many survivors walking out of that meeting ... wounded again."

'Dialogue has begun'

Still, the fact that there appears to be a genuine commitment on the part of the law society to improve how it communicates with Indigenous complainants and to better train staff for those situations is encouraging, Angeconeb said.

"This gathering of how we relate to one another, how we can improve how we do business with each other, how we can better relate to each other, that dialogue has begun," he said.

"I have to capitalize on that positive outcome of the day."

The process will have been successful if, in time, communication improves, and a lack of it doesn't mean First Nations complainants feel left out of the process, Angeconeb said.

"I think communication is really big," he added. "I think communication is [the] essential part of improving relations in terms of how we talk to one another."