The headstone David McCann installed in Alfred, Ont. is a small marker of what happened to many at St. Joseph’s Training School decades ago.
On the last day of October, a beautiful fall day, David McCann knelt at a headstone in St-Victor Cemetery in Alfred, Ont., 70 km east of Ottawa. There, he laid a bouquet of flowers at the marker, quietly read aloud the names of the three young men inscribed on the stone, and wept.
Not long afterwards, he left, both the cemetery and Alfred. Before he did, he paused momentarily to survey the town, and said, “I’ll never come back to this place.”
I am sure he’ll not set foot in Alfred again. I’m less sure that he can ever completely leave.
But with that quiet ceremony, the 78-year-old McCann, now a Vancouver resident, can at least close one chapter of a saga that has haunted him since he was 12.
It was that long ago, in December 1958, that McCann was brought to St. Joseph’s Training School for Boys, a reform school in Alfred run by the De La Salle Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic Papal religious lay order. Like many others there, he was sexually, physically and psychologically abused by the Brothers.
McCann got out, two years later. But not everyone who attended St. Joseph’s was as fortunate. The three young men whose names are etched on the headstone, for example, never left. Jean Marion, who was 17 or 18 when he died as the result of an explosion in 1946; Gérald Corbeil, who was 16 when he died the following year in a farming accident; and Claude Deschamps, just a boy of 12 or 13 when he drowned in 1957, were each interred in a unmarked grave in St-Victor Cemetery, adjacent to the school, without remembrance of any kind.
Evening Update
The deaths of the three were not deemed suspicious.
Authorities have known about them since 1990, a year after McCann went public with his story of abuse at the school. That revelation sparked an OPP investigation, and trials and convictions of many of the Brothers, both at St. Joseph’s and at a similar school, St. John’s, also run by the De La Salle Brothers, in Uxbridge. It also set off a lengthy reconciliation process — led by McCann and Ottawa lawyer Roger Tucker — aimed at getting some restorative relief for the thousands of boys and young men who attended St. Joseph’s, and their families.
And for the three-and-a-half decades since he first came forward to tell his story, McCann has continued to work on behalf of the many victims and their families to help them heal. For the last several years, for example, he’s been lobbying the Vatican for a papal apology that specifically mentions the sexual, physical and emotional abuse. It is a battle he is not giving up.
The installation of the headstone, meanwhile, ends his two-year campaign to simply give the three young men that small bit of posthumous dignity.
He paid for the stone himself — about $4,000. The process took as long as it did, he said, simply to navigate the layers of bureaucracy necessary to get permission from the parish in Alfred and the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall.
It shouldn’t have taken so long, he added, and he’s hoping his experience will at least clear a path for others who may find themselves seeking redress or reconciliation after experiences of abuse. “It should be a quick process. Otherwise it just adds to people’s pain and suffering.
“And I think it’s important because it’s part of that bigger story, about how we didn’t care, how we let it happen. This is a story people need to hear and understand, and they need to remember and honour those who never had the chance to speak for themselves — those whose futures were stolen from them.”
The bouquet that McCann brought with him last Thursday consisted of three types of flowers: red roses, representing the hearts of the families who lost their sons and brothers; white baby tears, representing the tears of the families and friends who missed them; and a single white rose, representing every as-yet-unidentified person in an unmarked grave, anywhere. The latter flower, McCann explained, was given to him by Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor whose Final Report on the Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burial in Canada was released in Gatineau last week. McCann, who says that about one-third of the students at St. Joseph’s were Indigenous — often runaways from Indian Residential Schools — met Murray two years ago when he was advocating for a search at St-Victor for unmarked graves. Portions of his story from St. Joseph’s are included in her new report.
“I’m glad I came,” McCann said after placing the flowers on the marker, an act witnessed only by Tucker, OPP investigator Mark Mackisoc, and this reporter. “It was the right thing to do, to make this trip.”
It won’t provide closure, a word too often cited when significant pain and emotional trauma are involved, and something often impossible to attain.
“I don’t think there ever is closure,” he said. “I think what you can get is reconciliation and healing.”
I first wrote about McCann in the spring of 2019, a couple of years into his quest for a papal apology. And every time I’ve spoken with him, whether over the phone, through email and text or in person, I have heard and sensed the painful tremors he experiences as he relives it again and again. I’ve often wondered why he keeps at it, pushing through the anguish and taking on more. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply put it in a box on a high shelf?
But then, every time I’ve written about him, I’ve heard from readers, usually family members of former wards at St. Joseph’s, wanting to get in touch with him. And each time he’s told me to send them his way. His efforts clearly still help people.
“I was the first to come forward,” he explains. “I was the leader they trusted. They trusted me to do the right thing, and that’s a role that I’ve carried for 35 years and will never walk away from.”
I can only wish him the best, and offer my hopes that he and the families of Jean Marion, Gérald Corbeil and Claude Deschamps can rest more easily now.
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