The Mount Cashel cover-up

The documentary record of the concealment is unusually complete, because a royal commission was eventually given the files.

The investigating officer was instructed to destroy his report and write another one omitting any reference to sex; he complied, producing a version describing physical abuse only. In March 1976 the Department of Justice directed the chief of police to have the officer produce yet another report with the sexual material removed. In January 1977 the deputy minister of justice concluded no further police action was warranted and the file was closed. The two Brothers who had confessed were sent to the United States for 'treatment' in late 1975 and then posted to other institutions run by the order. When the Evening Telegram prepared a story in January 1976, the publisher killed it.

The cover-up surfaced sideways. In April 1979 an RNC officer testifying at an unrelated inquiry cited Mount Cashel as an example of police cover-ups. Nothing followed. A second investigation in 1982 produced one conviction, and a four-month sentence that a judge reduced to twelve days served.

It broke in February 1989 when a caller to a St John's radio phone-in demanded a public inquiry, a Supreme Court justice listening took it up with the province, and Michael Harris published Shane Earle's account in the Sunday Express. The government appointed Justice Samuel Hughes to a royal commission that sat in public and on television. Hughes reported in 1991; the report was released in 1992 once trials had concluded. It found that officials had covered up the abuse and moved offenders, and recommended compensation.

The reactivated criminal investigation led to charges against fourteen staff on eighty-eight counts, and nine Christian Brothers were convicted.