Robert Riley Saunders faked his qualifications to work for the province.

A man who faked his qualifications to work as a social worker with B.C.'s Ministry of Children and Family Development has been sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding vulnerable, primarily Indigenous, teens in his care.

Robert Riley Saunders was first hired by the ministry in 1996. He used a fake bachelor of social work degree made out to be from the University of Manitoba, as part of his original employment applications, according to court filings.

Saunders showed very little emotion as Justice Steven Wilson imposed the sentence Monday morning in B.C. Supreme Court in Kelowna: five years for fraud and two years for breach of trust, to be served together, as well as an additional one month for forgery.

Crown prosecutors were seeking a prison sentence of between six and eight years, while the defence argued for two years of house arrest, followed by three years of probation.

Justice Wilson delivered a sentence closer to the Crown's recommendation than the defence's, ruling that Saunders' main motivation was greed, and as the gatekeeper of government resources, he took advantage of the youth in his care.

Saunders pleaded guilty in September 2021 to three of 13 charges, including fraud over $5,000 against the province, breach of trust in connection with his duties as a child protection guardianship worker and causing the province to act on a forged document.

Court heard he misappropriated more than $460,000 meant to go to children's care.

Before his sentencing, Saunders expressed "sincere remorse," saying he was sorry to his employer, his co-workers, and the youth and families impacted.

Saunders has been free on bail since his initial arrest and was immediately taken into custody following the sentencing hearing.

Former foster children, the majority of whom are Indigenous, had accused Saunders of steering them away from stable, loving homes onto the street or more independent living situations when they were children. They said he then used joint bank accounts to take government aid for himself when it was meant to fund their care.

The offences started in 2001 and continued until Saunders, 50, was fired from the Ministry of Children and Family Development in 2018.

Many clients claim they were left homeless as a result of Saunders' behaviour. Some said they suffered physical and sexual abuse and ended up living with addiction.

Saunders worked in Kelowna, B.C., but vanished from the Okanagan city after he was fired.

He eluded civil officials for months and was arrested in Alberta in December 2020.

Lawyers involved in the class-action lawsuit said they couldn't find Saunders to serve him with the lawsuit but that they'd heard rumours he spent part of the last two-and-a-half years working at golf courses in Calgary and Winnipeg.


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6531455
Clarifications
This story has been updated to reflect that Robert Riley Saunders did not have the proper qualifications to work as a social worker in British Columbia.
Jul 26, 2022 12:35 PM PT

It's worth noting that only few of the abused and oppressed actually gets justice.
Legal fees are very expensive.
Most victims are discredited by thier social status.
Victims are murdered or they perish under mysterious circumstances(they're silenced).
The govt trys to keep up an appearance of justice for political grandstanding/optics by making a scapegoat out of a tiny fraction of these criminals.

If it were naija, the fellow would be running for "pressent"

nedekid:
If it were naija, the fellow would be running for "pressent"

Lol...lemme show you thier prime minister.

BigBallsBiden:

Lol...lemme show you thier prime minister.

Masterviolence:


They would rather let the masses die than to resign.
The ambition to increase their wealth is far greater than the citizens lives.

The prime minister of Canada is worse...
I don't even know where to start.
Let me start with the SNC laval corruption affair and abuse of power misconduct.

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5014271
"On Aug. 14, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion released his report into the SNC-Lavalin affair, the political scandal that has led to the ouster of two cabinet ministers, the resignation of one of the prime minister's key aides and opposition calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down.

The scandal all centres on one key question: did the prime minister, someone in his office or other government officials try to pressure Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was attorney general to step in and resolve the corruption and fraud case against SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. in an effort to spare the Montreal-based engineering giant from criminal prosecution?"

Then there's the Aga Khan romance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan_affair#:~:text=The%20final%20report%20released%20by,the%20Conflict%20of%20Interests%20Act.
The Aga Khan affair was a political scandal in Canada involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In 2017, Trudeau was found guilty of violating sections 5,11,12, and 21[1] of the Federal Conflict of Interest Act[1] by accepting private-island vacations, gifts, and flights from the Aga Khan, a philanthropist and spiritual leader of the Shia Ismaili religion. This was deemed significant as the Aga Khan Foundation, a registered lobby, had received over $50 million of federal funding in 2016.[2][3][4]

Corruption in Canada worst in a decade, finds international watchdog

https://www.google.com/amp/s/biv.com/article/2022/01/corruption-canada-worst-decade-finds-international-watchdog%3famp
Canada has, once again, slipped down an international ranking for corruption, standing at 13th in the world and well back of world leaders, such as Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore.
Since 2015, the year Liberal leader Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister, Canada has fallen nine points, to a score of 74 out of 100 on the Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index. No country has seen a bigger drop in ratings since 2017 than Canada.

While the latest ranking is Canada's worst in a decade, the country remained at the top of the rankings in the Americas, where progress on stamping out corruption has "ground to a halt" and democracies like Chile and the United States rank even lower.

Should I mention his pedophilia and his depraved moral behavior? The list is endless.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM4m-es7WGo

A lot of immigrants (especially from Africa) have this misconception that 'indigenous people of Canada' is a term used to describe westerners in Canada.
This is wrong.
The westerners are the colonizers, they invaded Canada then subjugated and displaced the indigenous population to become the majority.
Nigeria got her theoretical independence from the colonial powers, Canada never did (in theory or in practice).
The head of state of Canada is the British monarch.
Canada is a western occupied state, an appendage of western colonialism.
The invaders have refused to go back to Europe.
Whilst they continue to exploit the natural resources of the indigenous people of Canada, the indigenous people have to endure overwhelming poverty, trauma, homelessness, addictions (trauma response), hopelessness, over representation in the criminal justice system etc..just to mention a few.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Canada

"According to some scholars, the Canadian government's laws and policies, including the residential school system, that encouraged or required Indigenous peoples to assimilate into a Eurocentric society, violated the United Nations Genocide Convention that Canada signed in 1949 and passed through Parliament in 1952. Therefore, these scholars believe that Canada could be tried in international court for genocide."

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Many of them in Nigeria are political godfathers to those who have PhD. One is now Governor in south west.