Former Nunavut teacher loses Ontario licence for sexual abuse of students

Warning: This story contains details that some readers may find disturbing.

After a seven-year wait, Iqaluit parents and former students are finally able to learn the fate of Mark Anthony Caine, 44, a once-respected teacher at Iqaluit’s Aqsarniit Middle School, who, in 2013, was accused of sexually abusing students.

Earlier this month, on Feb. 14, the disciplinary committee of the Ontario Teachers College revoked Caine’s certificate of qualification, the licence that allowed him to teach at publicly funded schools, after finding him guilty of professional misconduct.

They also revoked his certificate of registration, which means he’s no longer a member of the teachers college, and ordered him to pay $25,000 in costs.

The disciplinary committee imposed these penalties after writing a decision, dated April 1, 2019, that found Caine had sexually, physically and emotionally abused female students at Iqaluit’s Aqsarniit Middle School during the 2012-13 academic year.

Those allegations against Caine have never been proven in a criminal court.

Balance of probabilities

But the Ontario Teachers College disciplinary committee based its decision on a balance of probabilities, a lower standard of proof than what’s required in criminal cases.

This means they found the evidence of two former students who testified before them to be “more probable” than Caine’s version of events, their hearing decision states.

This ends a lengthy saga that began in early March 2013, when a female Aqsarniit student approached school administrators to allege Caine had touched or pushed up against her body.

During a subsequent investigation, the school administrators received similar complaints from three other female students, the disciplinary committee said.

The students also complained Caine addressed them with words and comments like “babe” and “sweetie” and “you are a beautiful girl.”

At the 2018 hearing into his conduct, Caine denied all the allegations and offered an alternative theory: that the girls had fabricated their stories because he threatened to discipline them by preventing them from attending a highly coveted school trip.

“It was [Caine’s] position that the students were good friends and they conspired against him out of revenge,” the decision states.

But the committee said Caine provided no evidence to support the idea that the two students who testified before them had been disciplined.

And each of the two students also said they had never been disciplined.

So for that reason, the teachers college committee found Caine’s theory to be “implausible.”

Caine’s film club won praise

When the allegations were made in 2013, Caine was a high-profile, well-respected figure in local education circles.

With a $5,000 grant from the Nunavut Film Development Corp., he had started a filmmaking program at the middle school, called “Through Inuit Eyes,” and used those funds to form the Aqsarniit Film Club.

Before Caine came to Nunavut in 2007, he had organized a similar film club at a middle school in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood in northwest Toronto, called the Our Eyes Film School.

His Iqaluit middle school students made eight short films, which were submitted to the annual Toronto Student Film Festival competition.

His Aqsarniit Film Club even visited the Nunavut legislature, where Eva Aariak, then the premier, heaped praise upon Caine’s film club in a minister’s statement given on March 1, 2013.

But the adulation stopped just two weeks later, after Caine’s students started bringing their allegations to school administrators and to the police.

On March 14, 2013, after Caine met with Don Peters, then the principal at Aqsarniit, and John Fanjoy, then the vice-principal, the Department of Education suspended Caine with pay, pending an investigation.

And by March 29, the RCMP had charged Caine with three counts of sexual interference under section 151 of the Criminal Code.

Sexual interference means touching the body of any young person under 16 for a sexual purpose, indirectly or directly, with a body part or an object.

Publication ban, widespread confusion

The RCMP wouldn’t reveal Caine’s name or the name of the school where he worked, but news organizations broadcast and printed his name anyway.

On April 12, 2013, Justice Andrew Mahar added to the confusion by imposing an unusual publication ban that stopped media from continuing to identify Caine or the school.

The publication ban stood until May of that year, when the CBC, appearing before a different judge, had the ban overturned.

But Caine’s case never went to trial, which meant the evidence against him was never made public in court and Iqaluit residents were never given a chance to find out what happened.

That’s because Crown lawyers, in July that year, entered a stay of proceedings on the three sexual interference charges, saying there was no reasonable prospect of convicting him.

By then, the Government of Nunavut had already fired Caine from his teaching job and removed the certificate that allowed him to teach in Nunavut.

For their part, the Ontario Teachers College didn’t decide to hold a hearing into Caine’s conduct until 2015, and didn’t hold that hearing until August 2018.

Two former middle school students testified at the hearing, along with Aqsarniit principal Don Peters and another Aqsarniit employee, Kim Roberts.

The Ontario Teachers College decision wasn’t made until April 2019 and their decision on a penalty wasn’t made until the middle of last month.

Caine taught in Toronto from 1998 to 2006. In 2007, he moved to Nunavut, where he taught at Peter Pitseolak Elementary School in Cape Dorset until 2012, when he began teaching at Aqsarniit school in Iqaluit.

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