National Post (National Edition)
Tina Fontaine was 5-3, 78 lbs of invisible
Report talks of ‘churning anger’ over teen’s death
For all the failures, individual and systemic, that marked the life and egregious death of Tina Michelle Fontaine, the greatest is that so many people and agencies were unable to see the tiny girl as the complete and worthy human being she was.
She was Indigenous, and somehow, that meant she didn’t matter.
Tina’s body, wrapped in a blanket and weighted down with rocks, was recovered from the Red River in Winnipeg on Aug. 17, 2014.
Her death brought to the fore what Manitoba’s advocate for children and youth, Daphne Penrose, called “a churning anger of a nation enraged.”
As Penrose said in her report, released Tuesday, on Tina’s death, “One thing we know to be true, and which you will read about in Tina’s story is that she carried a burden that was not her own.”
That burden is the history of colonization and the legacy of trauma. Penrose doesn’t say it, but the burden includes racism. Tina’s parents were marked, ruined, by it all.
Her father’s father was a survivor of residential schools and his violence and alcoholism saw Tina’s dad flee his reserve at the age of 12 to fend for himself on the streets of Winnipeg, where he too began to struggle with alcoholism.
Tina’s mother’s mother had relationships with men coloured by violence and addiction; she too was sometimes left to fend for herself. She was apprehended by Child and Family Services (CFS) several times, and became a permanent ward of one CFS agency at the age of 10.
When the two met, Tina’s mother was a child of 12 and “in care” (what a cruel joke that phrase is) and her dad was 23. The agency knew they had a sexual relationship, and that Tina’s mother was being sexually exploited by an adult almost twice her age.
Oh well.
The agency did nothing to protect Tina’s mother.
She had their first baby when she was 14; she had Tina when she was 17, when she herself was still “in care.”
And what else but racism — not seeing Indigenous children — explains why Manitoba CFS until 2015, after Tina’s death, continued to use hotels and motels as suitable emergency placements for children, most of whom are Indigenous? Who does that? Who could have ever thought it was a good idea to put vulnerable, frightened kids in a crappy hotel?
Those hotel placements bracketed Tina’s short life.
All of a year old, she and her four-monthold sibling were apprehended by CFS in October of 2000 and “placed in a hotel.”
It was nine days before her death — deemed undetermined though “highly suspicious,” it was a death by grotesque neglect and incompetence on behalf of the involved bureaucracies — that two members of the Winnipeg Police notoriously pulled over a car at 5:15 a.m., smelled alcohol on the driver’s breath, and saw Tina.
By then, she was a reported missing person, but the two officers let her go.
A few hours later, for the last time in her life, Tina was sent to a hotel after being discharged from hospital.
She’d been found unconscious in a back alley; she told paramedics she’d been with a man and had done all kinds of drugs (she tested positive for speed, weed and cocaine); doctors were sure she’d been sexually assaulted but Tina denied it. She then told one of her CFS workers she was hanging with “Sebastian,” a 62-year-old meth user.
(This would turn out to be Raymond Cormier, who was in December of 2015 charged with second-degree murder in Tina’s death. At the end of February last year, he was acquitted.)
Alrighty then.
The CFS agency requested an emergency hotel placement for her. She told the worker she wanted to meet up with friends. The worker said that wasn’t a great idea, but if she did go out, she should be back by midnight.
The worker left the hotel. So did Tina, not much later.
Over the ensuing days, Tina was spotted with men, with Winnipeg Police told she was “working the streets.” The force issued a BeOn-the-lookout for, or BOLO reports, but as with virtually all the agencies involved in her case, appears to have done little else. And as with virtually all those other agencies, notes were incomplete.
Finally, but too late, a worker and manager with Streetreach, the one agency in this sorry story that did its job, began looking for her. They identified her as “a very high risk child.” The Streetreach manager took one look at Tina’s file and said, “… looks like it is a jurisdictional nightmare with a bunch of different agencies playing hot potato, it’s-your-casenot-ours.”
Streetreach asked the CFS agency for a referral, so they could prioritize Tina; it took CFS four bloody days.
By then, Tina was right and properly missing.
She was 15 years old. She stood 5-foot-3 inches and weighed about 78 pounds. She was doing drugs and being sexually exploited. She simply could not have been more vulnerable.
And yet she had never received any counselling — not one single session — from Manitoba Justice’s victim services after the violent and sudden death of her father in October of 2011, when she was just 12.
It was, the people who knew Tina told Penrose, the event that changed Tina’s life. For all her dad’s frailties, she loved him desperately, of course, and she went downhill in the years afterwards.
Tina was entitled to counselling, to help, and the woman she called “grandma,” who was really her great-aunt and who was her real caregiver for a decade, advocated ferociously for her in this regard and others. Victims services didn’t hear her, as the saying goes, because they didn’t see her either.
Penrose’s report is simple. She makes only five recommendations. She said if Manitobans “keep our eyes locked on the results of trauma, then we will ignore the reasons that cause trauma …”
“At the writing of this special report,” she said, “our office is actively advocating for and working with 17 Manitoba youth who are at imminent risk of harm and death and who require safe and secure detox and treatment.”
There are 17 more Tinas she knows about. It’s not a report. It’s an indictment.