Two Innu women, who grew up in the Nunavik Youth Protection System, filed a class action lawsuit Tuesday against the governments of Quebec and Canada over what they alleged were decades of illegal and discriminatory underfunding of youth protection and other essential services for the children who live there. Nonavik.
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Lucy Tokaluk and Tanya Jones consider themselves DPJ survivors in Nunavik. “I am taking action today because I want justice for my people – my people who have been inhumanely treated for decades. I want the Inuit children of Nunavik to have the opportunity to be heard in the courts,” Jones said in a statement.
Prosecutors also seek to prevent a new generation from being ensnared like themselves in the intergenerational shock cycle. “It was taken from my mother when I was born and sent thousands of miles as a newborn to a hospital in Montreal. I stayed there for seven months, on my own and without support,” shared Ms. Tokaluk.
“Then I was brought back to Nunavik into a system that completely abandoned me and the other Inuit children in the darkest indifference and savage abuse. I don’t want the same thing to happen to my children and future generations of Inuit in Quebec.”
In June 2019, the federal government penalized Bill C-92 in 2019, which gives more autonomy and resources to create services similar to DYP. A project that Quebec objected to once it was approved. This appeal was dismissed in the Court of Appeal on February 10.
