The government of Canada on Saturday apologized to the Inuit of northern Quebec for the mass killing of sled dogs in the 1950s and 1960s, which devastated communities by depriving them of the ability to hunt and travel. A 2010 report from Jean-Jacques Croteau, a retired Superior Court of Quebec judge, found Quebec provincial police officers killed more than 1,000 dogs "without any consideration for their importance to Inuit families." "Without investigation and without asking the owners about the importance of the dogs they wanted to kill, without inquiring whether the dogs they wanted to kill constituted a real, serious and current danger to the people." "This was a horrendous betrayal...it should not have taken decades for Canada to apologize to Nunavik Inuit," he said The federal government's role in it, Croteau found, was failing to intervene or condemn the actions.