Canadian Writer Laura Robinson: Protection of Olympic Chief John Furlong ‘Sets Back Judicial and First Nations Relationships By Decades’

We’ve been telling you about John Furlong, the CEO of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, who appears to be an old schoolteaching colleague of fellow Irish native George Gibney — the de facto fugitive former national swim coach, who has been harbored in the U.S. for more than 20 years in the face of renewal of allegations regarding his rampant sexual abuse of underage athletes (and others) in his charge.

Writer Laura Robinson exposed Furlong’s fudged sordid past, during his first residency in Canada in 1969, when he was an abusive teacher at a Catholic missionary school for First Nations students in rural British Columbia.

Furlong sued Robinson for defamation, but walked away from the case before a definitive resolution. Now — in the midst of a campaign to reconcile and redress centuries of mistreatment of the country’s native populations — there is a campaign to reverse a ruling by Catherine Wedge, a judge who presided over the Furlong-Robinson proceedings (and, perhaps not coincidentally, once a member of the Canadian equestrian team at the Olympics), which excluded the testimony of Furlong’s alleged First Nations victims.

Below, in bold, is the latest in Robinson’s own words.

We also encourage you to read the affidavits of the eight Furlong accusers, linked to a comprehensive treatment of the story, at http://canadalandshow.com/article/i-remember-john-furlong.

See also this op-ed piece from several months ago, by Joan McEwen in the National Observer: http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/11/26/opinion/waiting-be-heard-claimants-versus-john-furlong.

And here again is the letter appeal to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from the former students of Immaculata Parish School: http://www.justtrylistening.org/.

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On March 30 I filed an official letter of complaint to the Canadian Judicial Council about Justice Catherine Wedge of the B.C. Supreme Court because of her bias against First Nations people. This concerns the case Robinson v. Furlong 2015 BCSC 1690, Docket S140603, in which I was the Plaintiff. Please find that letter attached. The letter refers to many appendices that contain additional evidence showing Justice Wedge’s bias. To avoid a massive amount of data, I have not included the appendices but am happy to send any requested.

Justice Wedge’s September 2015 decision set back judicial and First Nations relationships by decades.  

She disallowed affidavits and signed on-the-record statements from First Nations people who alleged abuse by John Furlong when he was a missionary/teacher at Immaculata Day School and and Prince George College, calling them hearsay. Those statements showed the childhood abuse alleged by dozens of people, as well as allegations of domestic violence witnessed by the women who were girls in Hostel #2, where Mr. Furlong and his first wife were hostel supervisors. A statement also came from his second wife, Dayle Turner, about the domestic violence she alleged—it was all called hearsay.

Yet Justice Wedge didn’t just allow hearsay from Mr. Furlong—she used it as evidence on which she built her decision. And what “truth” had Mr. Furlong provided?

• An unsupported and completely untrue statement his PR people at TwentyTen Group distributed in October 2, 2012 about his family in Ireland

• The unsigned “Furlong family letter” of January 2013 also distributed by TwentyTen Group

• An anecdote about a person—whose name he couldn’t remember—who called him from Burns Lake about a “poster”—a poster that did not exist according to the First Nations  in Burns Lake and Lake Babine

Justice Wedge used this ridiculous hearsay to argue that the publishing of allegations of abuse made by First Nations people, and the investigation into his past both in Ireland and his role as hostel supervisor with his wife at Prince George College harmed not only Mr. Furlong, but his family. She repeated his hearsay time and time again in her decision, while calling the First Nations disallowed affidavits “unreliable.”

If there was no evidence for her narrative, she simply retold the story of real human-beings in Northern B.C. the way she wanted it told—moving entire communities, dates, families, peers, police, and journalist wherever she needed them. Justice Wedge even created a new life history for Daniel Morice, who she declared did not attend Immaculata when diocese documents said he did.[…]