GNWT too confused, fearful, to deal with Ed Horne

Ed Horne leaves the Iqaluit courthouse in January, 2008. A 25-year-old government report obtained through an access to information request reveals that although many people suspected something was wrong at the school in Kimmirut, no one knew how to handle it. (FILE PHOTO)

Isolation and bureaucratic inertia on the part of the Government of the Northwest Territories are what allowed Ed Horne to get away with sexually abusing children in Kimmirut, say documents obtained by Nunatsiaq News.

Horne’s position as a trusted, Inuktitut-speaking principal allowed him to control the situation, while the perceived indifference of a distant territorial government left parents in Kimmirut unsure anything was wrong, and reluctant to complain, wrote consultant Kevin Van Camp, in a December, 1985 report to Joe Handley, then the deputy minister of education for the GNWT.

“Nothing in their experience led them to imagine something of the nature of what was happening,” Van Camp wrote. “They did not know what to look for from the children or how to interpret what they saw.”

Horne was sentenced in 1987 to six years in prison for molesting 24 boys in Kimmirut and Cape Dorset between 1983 and 1985.

Many of those individuals have been part of recent lawsuits seeking damages from the GNWT and the Government of Nunavut.

Van Camp wrote that, as principal, Horne was the main person responsible for evaluating the school’s operations for administrators in Yellowknife and Iqaluit.

Combined with Horne’s ability to speak Inuktitut, Kimmirut’s isolation allowed Horne “to exercise and extraordinary level of control.”

Compounding the problem was that the then-new community education committee, the forerunner of today’s district education committees, was unsure about what to do.

“Local governance of education is new to the region,” Van Camp wrote. “Principals of schools are held in high regard by residents and many CEC members do not yet have the confidence to challenge them.”

At any rate, many of the government officials interviewed by Van Camp said they felt that nothing would have been done had they complained.

“Government is seen as remote and that it would not keep concerns, suspicions, etc. confidential,” he wrote. “Thus the perceived risk by employees at a remote and bottom layer of the bureaucracy was seen to be too great.”

Van Camp, a Manitoba education official, was hired by the NWT education department to investigate the aftermath of Horne’s sexual abuse in Kimmirut, then called Lake Harbour.

He interviewed more than 20 people in Kimmirut and Iqaluit during his trip, but the names of all those people are blacked out in the documents.

And in his report, Van Camp goes to great lengths to state he’s not trying to assign blame to individuals for what happened in Kimmirut.

Nunatsiaq News obtained a copy of the report through an access to information request. Nunatsiaq News also requested a copy of a letter sent in January, 1986 by Handley to Iqaluit-based education officials in response the report.

That letter remains mired in the NWT bureaucracy and can’t be released until some of the people named in the letter are first consulted for privacy reasons, said Lorna Dosso, the access to information coordinator for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment in Yellowknife.

It could take months before the Handley letter is released, she said.

But the letter could shed light on the bureaucratic response to the Horne case.

In his report, Van Camp makes nine recommendations, including new protocols for reporting child abuse, training for staff and teachers to help them identify abuse, requirements to report cases of abuse and tighter supervision of school staff in remote communities.

Van Camp also called for “a clear statement of… authority” for local education committees in matters of recruiting and supervision of teachers and staff.