Website aims to stir leads on missing persons files

The RCMP has launched a new national website featuring details of hundreds of cases of missing persons and unidentified remains in an effort to generate new leads.

The force acknowledged Thursday that the files posted online represent only a “sampling” of all the cases out there.

All information on the site, www. canadasmissing.ca, is submitted by police, medical examiners or chief coroners, officials said. New cases may be added at the request of primary investigators.

Among the missing persons profiled are women who vanished along B.C.’s infamous Highway of Tears.

The site currently contains information on 427 missing adults, 113 missing children and 157 unidentified remains.

Some files are very detailed, offering a range of information about a person’s physical characteristics, clothes they were wearing, and last known whereabouts.

Some files are accompanied by photographs or — in the case of unidentified remains — artists’ renderings.

The site’s home page cautions visitors that images on the site “may be disturbing” and that reasonable efforts have been made to present cases in a way that doesn’t offend viewers or disrespect the deceased.

The website is one component of a $10-million initiative announced by the federal government in 2010.

Other parts of the initiative included the creation of a national database containing all missing persons and unidentified human remains cases and improvements to the Canadian Police Information Centre — the central database used by the nation’s police forces — to capture more information about missing people.

Claudette Dumont-Smith, executive director of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, which has been shining a spotlight on missing or murdered aboriginal women and girls, said the association would have preferred a website with more “specificity to aboriginals.”