One of several roses in memory of victims hangs on the fence surrounding the former pig farm of Canadian mass murderer Robert Pickton, who was convicted in 2007.Chris Helgren/Reuters
Canada claims that it does not discriminate – that Indigenous women have the same rights as any other person under Canadian law.
But politicians, the justice system and police constantly prove the opposite.
The latest example, in a country where Indigenous people had to scream and protest until lawmakers agreed to search a landfill outside of Winnipeg where police believe the bodies of at least two missing First Nations women are buried, comes to us from British Columbia. B.C.’s RCMP is looking to destroy approximately 14,000 pieces of evidence that could be connected to the disappearance of at least 65 women, most of them Indigenous, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1978 and 2001. The evidence was collected as part of Project Evenhanded – the investigation into notorious serial killer Robert Pickton, who was given a life sentence for the murder of six women in 2007, and then killed in prison in May.
Many questions about the case are still unresolved. How many women did Mr. Pickton kill? The DNA of 33 women was initially found at one of the biggest crime scenes in Canadian history – Mr. Pickton’s pig farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C. But though he was originally charged with the deaths of 26 women, 20 charges were ultimately stayed. What’s more, in prison, he claimed to have killed 49 women to an undercover officer posing as an inmate.
And did Mr. Pickton act alone, or did he have an accomplice? We still don’t know for sure.
Despite all those questions, the RCMP sought to dispose of that material, which would definitively quash these avenues of investigation.
In 2012, former B.C. attorney-general Wally Oppal concluded an inquiry into the societal failures surrounding the Pickton case. A general theme he found was that the police didn’t take the disappearances of the women in the Downtown Eastside seriously. The National Inquiry into MMIWG that followed only confirmed what we knew to be true: this continues to happen all over Canada.
It is beyond logic that the RCMP now wants to destroy evidence that could inform, at minimum, the stayed cases of those 20 women. There are still families searching for answers, who don’t know what happened to their sisters and daughters and who deserve to find out.
Yet the RCMP has effectively decided that the unsolved missing and murdered women’s cases are closed, Sue Brown, a lawyer who leads an initiative called Justice for Girls, told me.
While the RCMP says that any DNA has been stored in a database and exhibits have been photographed, the evidence – collected more than 20 years ago – hasn’t had the benefit of being re-examined using the latest technology, Ms. Brown said. She added that in many other jurisdictions, evidence is kept for many decades – but for the material collected at one of Canada’s most hideous crime scenes, two decades is apparently enough.
“All of that evidence ought to be retested,” she said. “Many missing women were never definitely linked to the farm; it is possible their cases could be linked but we’ll never know until the RCMP investigates.”
Ms. Brown was alerted to the RCMP’s efforts by Sasha Reid, a developmental psychologist who works with a group of women called the Midnight Order to investigate cold cases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while examining Mr. Pickton’s trial, they discovered the RCMP were filing applications to dispose of the evidence.
“When you see this long list of evidence being disposed of,” Ms. Reid said, “you can’t help but think of why there is no justice.”
Indigenous women and families know why. We see it play out time and again, in the planned court-ordered destruction of residential-school claimant records in 2027 (unless claimants want them archived) and in the indignities done to women’s remains. I can’t help but think of Cindy Gladue, the 36-year-old mother and sex worker whose pelvis was kept in a box and presented at the trial of the man eventually convicted in her death.
There is no excuse here. Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc must stop what could be a colossal miscarriage of justice and another Canadian betrayal of Indigenous women. The government can call for a new investigation, and it must ensure that all deaths of vulnerable women are given fair and equal treatment. If it does not, as Ms. Brown says, “it will have long-term consequences and undermine the families’ and our quest for justice, our confidence in police and our justice system.”
The families of Mr. Pickton’s victims and the dozens of others who are missing deserve more than they have ever gotten from Canada’s justice system or society. So stop sending the message that some women’s lives are worth more than others. Reopen the investigation; it is not too late. And don’t destroy the evidence.