The Quebec Court of Appeal on Friday overturned a lower court’s decision requiring McGill University to comply with an agreement reached with indigenous women and continue excavation work on the site of the old Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal under certain conditions.
In its decision, the appeals court wrote that the judge had “misjudged the scope of his authority to issue protective orders.”
“The order he made is unenforceable,” the appeals court wrote. “Under the guise of a case management measure, he decided the parties’ rights under the Agreement and arrogated to himself the power to oversee the application of the Agreement without any genuine debate on the merits.”
These conditions were part of an agreement reached in November with the Mohawk Mothers, a group of Kanien’kehá:ka women, to search for possible unmarked graves at the site.
The agreement came after the Mohawk Mothers, also known as Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera, filed a civil lawsuit in March 2023 to stop the development. The group argued that there may be unmarked indigenous graves on the site that could be excavated, as well as archaeological remains of a pre-colonial Iroquois settlement.
The site is also home to the Allan Memorial Institute, where CIA-funded mind control experiments were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s.
Before the agreement, the Mohawk mothers had argued that the university and the Société québécoise des Infrastructures failed to properly involve a team of archaeologists tasked with overseeing the search for possible unmarked graves at the former hospital, the site of a future downtown campus expansion.
