Aboriginal inquest a costly exercise that will accomplish nothing
If ever you wondered why there should not be a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, I give you its mini-me, the Ontario coroner’s inquest into the deaths of seven aboriginal young people.
The inquest is ongoing — in its fashion — before Dr. David Eden and a five-member jury in Thunder Bay, Ont.
The qualifier about its ongoingness arises from the fact that after a gruelling four days last week, punctuated by break after break, the inquest sat for a day and a half this week before promptly adjourning Wednesday.
It is not sitting at all next week, this as per the agreed-upon regular schedule, which has it working Monday to Thursday for two weeks, then off for a week, etc., because so many of the players have to travel to get there. The inquest is slated to go into the spring. I predict it will last longer.
I covered the first four-day week, and can report that it was replete with the usual self-congratulatory flatulence, many of the lawyers regularly thanking the witnesses for their courage and Dr. Eden effusively thanking the lawyers for their professionalism.
On one of those days, I looked about the courtroom and realized to my horror that I was perhaps the only person in the room who was not actively latched on one way or another to the public teat.
There are another couple of reporters sometimes, and regular folks observing, and one lawyer representing the Thunder Bay Police Association, a party with standing, whose fees would be paid by members’ dues.
There are three provincial prosecutors, all paid by the Ontario government, and nine other parties with standing, each of which is represented by at least one lawyer and sometimes two.
On this particular day, I counted 12 or 13 lawyers in the room.
The other parties with standing — it means they have a direct interest in the inquest and could conceivably be the subject of recommendations — are six of the seven families of the dead young people, who are represented by Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto; the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council, a local school board that takes in the Thunder Bay high school where six of the young people were enrolled at the time of their deaths; the Thunder Bay Police Service, board and chief, all represented by the same Toronto firm; the City of Thunder Bay; the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth; Nishnawbe Aski Nation or NAN, the political organization that encompasses the late kids’ home reserves in remote Northern Ontario; the Ontario First Nations Young People’s Council of the Chiefs of Ontario, the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario.
All of those organizations either are government (the city, province and feds) or are financed primarily if not wholly by one or another level of government. It is an inference, but I think a fair one, that their legal representation at the inquest will also be publicly funded.
The presiding coroner, of course, is a salaried Ontario employee. His constable comes from the OPP.
The seven young people whose deaths are being examined came to Thunder Bay from their remote, often fly-in, reserves to go to high school.
For the inquest, that means a couple of things.
It means that since their families come from the same places, they likely couldn’t attend the proceedings. Thus, a couple of years ago when this thing was in the planning, the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services transferred $250,000 to NAN to assist the families to attend.
The coroner’s office, meantime, says Ontario Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer is picking up the cost of the webcast, whatever that turns out to be — the inquest already has been moved once, from a small and unsuitable room it was assigned by local judges to a proper one, and it could happen again.
Huyer said Thursday in a phone interview that the numbers signing on to watch the webcast have ranged from 50 to 150 a day.
The coroner’s office (it’s a branch of the same ministry) is responsible for paying the five jurors a small daily fee but also for picking up their travel costs.
Usually, that’s not prohibitive, because jurors usually live in the area where they serve.
But this is the first coroner’s jury in the province to have benefited from the volunteer jury initiative, as it was called, which was designed to increase First Nations representation on Ontario juries.
NAN, through Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler and NAN lawyer Julian Falconer, played a key role in the project and toured some of the remote northern reserves — and actually ended up with more than 350 volunteers.
This is the first inquest in Ontario to proceed using that list as part of the pool, randomly chosen, and with one of the five from the new list, travel and expenses will obviously be higher than usual.
Some of this is clearly good news — more representative juries, more First Nation participation — but, in the end, what the inquest will accomplish is dubious.
The attention paid to the underlying issues — the residentialschool hangover, which has so decimated aboriginal families, the dysfunction and despair on some of these reserves — can’t, I suppose, be a bad thing, though I suspect most Canadians know all this already.
But the recommendations of coroner’s juries are just that. Governments and public institutions can act on them, or not, and mostly they don’t. And if nothing changes, and almost always nothing changes, then it will have been a painful and expensive exercise, period, just as an inquiry into the missing and murdered aboriginal women likely would be.