Church deserves hockey-like scrutiny
Sexual abuse numbers are shocking
In communities all across Canada there are two buildings you are sure to find, a hockey arena and a Catholic church. Recently, both those institutions were in the news for their handling of sexual abuse.
Hockey Canada was before a parliamentary subcommittee for its handling of allegations arising from events on the night of their 2018 world junior team gala in London, and the head of the Catholic church, the Pope himself, was criss-crossing Canada on an apology tour for the legacy of residential schools.
Let me provide a comparison of available data on sexual abuse settlements made by Hockey Canada and the Catholic church in Canada.
Hockey Canada recently disclosed it has paid out $8.9 million since 1989 to settle 21 cases of alleged sexual assault, not including the recent settlement in the London incident.
That is fewer than one case a year. We can safely predict it is not all the incidents of hockey-related sexual abuse because not all victims come forward. But that’s also true for other settings.
There is no national data for Catholic church sexual abuse settlements. The church says it does not keep track due to its decentralized structure.
While the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops exists at the national level, it does not require or request reporting. But the law firm where I am a partner, Beckett Personal Injury Lawyers in London, has kept track of our efforts since 2003.
The numbers are shocking.
In the last nearly two decades, settlements for our clients involving just the Roman Catholic Diocese of London, total $23.1 million for 86 victims.
That is four to five cases a year for just one of 73 dioceses in Canada. Even conservatively extrapolating these numbers on a national scale gets pretty frightening.
In total since 2003, Beckett has settled almost $56 million from the Canadian Catholic Church for more than 230 victims. That does not include other law firms’ efforts, class actions or any litigation in Quebec. It also does not include the millions the Catholic Church paid, and in fact still owes, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement.
The church pays no taxes and is exempt from a variety of legislation because of its special status. Donations approach almost a $1 billion a year ($886 million in 2019).
It even gets the privilege of its own separate school system, for which no other religion gets public funding.
Looking at these sexual abuse numbers, one must wonder why the Catholic church receives any privileges at all.
Why has Parliament never called a subcommittee to examine the church?
Why has no pope, cardinal or bishop even had to undergo the same scrutiny as Hockey Canada?
Where is this nation’s outrage against the Catholic church? Many other nations have put their outrage into action with formalized government investigations.
At least eight American states have conducted grand jury investigations. Ireland (2009), Australia (2017) and France (2021) have all held national-level investigations of sexual abuse within the church while other nations have carried out more localized inquiries.
Maybe it is time for Canada to do so and to strive for change and prevention as we are so nobly doing with Canadian sport.
Let’s make both buildings safe, the arena and the church.
Postmedia News
Rob Talach is a London lawyer who represents victims of sexual abuse all across Canada.
He has litigated hundreds of lawsuits against the Catholic
church and most recently represented the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Hockey Canada that precipitated the recent hearings before a parliamentary subcommittee.