Family of missing Indigenous woman expresses lack of confidence in inquiry
Failure to ask major urban police forces to hand over case files sparks outrage
Mary Papatsie’s family has little confidence in the police investigation into the woman’s disappearance or in the national inquiry into the many missing and murdered Indigenous women like her.
“The family and loved ones of Mary Papatsie have little to no confidence in the MMIW inquiry, and the police handling the cases,” the family said in a statement.
Papatsie’s family issued the statement in response to recent revelations the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls has yet to request relevant case files from major urban police forces across the country.
As reported by Postmedia this week, police agencies in eight major Canadian cities — Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal — say they haven’t been contacted by the national inquiry to provide documents.
Ottawa police confirmed they had likewise fielded no requests from the national inquiry.
According to the Ottawa Police Service, “No request has been made in regard to any OPS homicide files … (and) our missing persons unit has confirmed that they received no inquiry from MMIW.”
Papatsie, 40, a mother of 10 who had lived in Ottawa for about 10 years, was last seen in late April, according to local police. The Inuit woman may have been living on the street on Montreal Road, and was known to frequent the area around Montreal Road and Bégin Street at the time of her disappearance.
Her disappearance went unreported for five weeks, and police issued their first missing persons press bulletin in June 2017. By July, the investigation had been upgraded, with the Ottawa police major crime unit taking over the file “due to some red flags suggesting this isn’t just a case of a missing person,” according to police at the time.
The MMIW inquiry, now nearly a year-and-a-half into its mandate, has said reviewing police files is a “centrepiece” of its investigation, yet many police agencies across the country say the inquiry has not asked them for records.
The inquiry also says it has been unable to start reviewing the police files it does have due to technological challenges, though the problems have recently been resolved and it expects that work to begin shortly.
Since its launch, the national inquiry has been criticized for not focusing enough on police missteps during investigations involving Indigenous women. Last summer, the inquiry went out of its way to clarify that it “can and will consider the conduct of policing services.”
But it’s unclear what has been achieved since then.
Jennifer Cox, the commission’s lead legal counsel, told Postmedia there are ongoing “conversations about document production” with police agencies’ legal teams. The inquiry currently has case files from “pretty much all over the country,” Cox said, some obtained through subpoenas and others from family members. But the inquiry didn’t provide details about what subpoenas it had issued, or which police forces had been contacted.
The national inquiry has obtained documents from at least three police agencies in Canada — the RCMP, the Thunder Bay Police Service and the Sûreté du Québec — which the commissioners first mentioned months ago.
In September, the four commissioners appeared before the House of Commons Indigenous affairs committee to give a briefing on the inquiry’s progress.
“We have always intended to investigate policing, and I think the best way of describing it succinctly is that we intend to investigate the investigations,” Marion Buller, chief commissioner, told the committee.
She said the inquiry had already begun engaging with police services including the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police, Thunder Bay police, “and more in the works, to obtain documents from them.”
The national inquiry was given until November 2018 to produce its final report. The commissioners have been saying for months that they plan to ask for an extension, but it doesn’t appear that they have made a formal request.
I think the best way of describing it succinctly is that we intend to investigate the investigations.