Two Innu women, who grew up in Nunavik’s youth protection system, filed a class action lawsuit on Tuesday against the governments of Quebec and Canada for what they allege are decades of illegal and discriminatory underfunding of youth protection services and other essential services for children living in Nunavik.
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Lucy Tookalook and Tanya Jones both consider themselves survivors of the DPJ in Nunavik. “I am taking action today because I want justice for my people – my people who have been treated inhumanely for decades. I want Inuit children in Nunavik to have a chance to be heard by the courts,” Jones said in a statement.
The plaintiffs also seek to prevent a new generation from being like them trapped in the cycle of intergenerational trauma. “I was taken from my mother when I was born and sent thousands of miles away as a newborn to a hospital in Montreal. I was there for seven months, alone and without support,” Ms Tookalook shared.
“I was then sent back to Nunavik into a system that completely abandoned me and other Inuit children in the darkest indifference and cruelest abuse. I don’t want the same thing to happen to my children and to future generations of Inuit in Quebec.”
In June 2019, the federal government sanctioned Bill C-92 in 2019, which grants even more autonomy and resources for the establishment of services similar to the DYP. A project that Quebec contested as soon as it was sanctioned. This challenge was dismissed in the Court of Appeal on February 10.