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"I was stunned. I mean, this man, who apologized and said sex abuse of any kind is wrong, is himself now charged with horrible crimes involving children? That shocked me." — John McKiggan, Arnold Pizzo McKiggan abused as boys by priests in northern Nova Scotia over the past six decades. The driving force behind the settlement was Bishop Raymond Lahey, the 69-year-old, cherub-faced prelate whose decision to make peace with victims was a radical departure from the stance of his predecessor, who for years had either brushed aside sex abuse claims or vowed to fight them in court. "We want to do the right thing," said Lahey last summer, sitting next to Martin at a news conference where the settlement was announced. "I want to formally apologize to every victim. . . . I want them to know how sorry we are, how wrong this abuse was, and how we are now attempting to right those wrongs." Lahey became the talk of the province. Despite the enormous financial burden now facing his diocese — and the criticism from some church members that the class action settlement would bankrupt their parishes — Lahey was hailed in the Nova Scotia media as a "vision- ary" Catholic leader, a man of refreshing candour and moral courage. The class action and the settlement were certified the following month by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, and McKiggan left the court hearing in a celebratory mood, confident the deal would proceed smoothly, and happy to have played a role in engineering a measure of justice for Martin and other victims — with the support of an honest bishop. Two weeks after the certification hearing, McKiggan learned from news reports that Lahey had abruptly and mysteriously resigned his post "for personal reasons." McKiggan assumed, as many others did, that the bishop had been pressured to quit by the Vatican, or by power- ful lay members of the diocese, unhappy that he had committed millions of dollars in church assets to abuse survivors without so much as a fight. "I thought he'd been pushed out," he says. Five days later, on the afternoon of Oct. 1, McKiggan was sitting in his office in downtown Halifax when the phones began ringing off the hook. First to call was a reporter from the CBC, buzzing McKiggan on his 28 JANU AR Y 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com cellphone, but it was a bad connection and the reporter said he would try again. Before they could reconnect, McKiggan got a frantic call from his client Martin, from the hairdressing salon he owns in Sydney, N.S. "Oh my God John, there's reporters and TV cameras outside my shop," Martin said over the line. "The bishop's just been charged with possession of child pornography." "What?" replied McKiggan, as a CTV reporter walked into the reception area of his law office. McKiggan hung up and called the lawyer for the diocese, who con- firmed that Lahey had been charged, several days earlier, with possession and importation of child pornography. Airport customs officers had pulled Lahey aside in Ottawa, as he was returning from a foreign vacation, and found images of boys engaged in sex acts on his laptop computer. "I was stunned," says McKiggan. "I mean, this man, who apologized and said sex abuse of any kind is wrong, is himself now charged with horrible crimes involving children? That shocked me." Not only was the key figure behind the church's settle- ment agreement now facing criminal charges, the deal itself was soon under attack from a law firm in Ontario and a client — one of the diocese's alleged victims — who publicly derided the settlement as a legally flawed deal and sellout to the church. If a single class member opted out of the lawsuit, the diocese could walk away from the deal. What had looked in September like a $15-million, court-approved fait accompli, was now not only a source of controversy, but was in serious jeopardy of falling apart. J OHN McKiggan first made a name for himself representing victims of childhood abuse in the mid-1990s, when he filed the country's first residen- tial school class action, Bernard v. Canada, against the Crown. The case sought compensation for hundreds of former residents of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia. McKiggan later joined the steer- ing committee of the national residential schools class action, Baxter v. Canada, which was the basis of Ottawa's