Commentary
Yes, the title is an affected rejigging of Shakespeare’s soliloquy from a tormented Hamlet, perhaps the most famous lines in English literature. But just as Hamlet was consumed by death, delay, indecision, and emotion, so is the tragic battle over whether to excavate the Prairie Green landfill north of of Winnipeg to search for the remains of two women, both murdered in the early years of what should have been long, fulfilling lives.
Outside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Aug. 17,
a crowd gathered before marching through downtown Winnipeg urging the government to search the landfill.
Such demands are growing louder and spreading
coast to coast. Solidarity rallies have been held outside the Vancouver Art Gallery and outside the Confederation Building in St. John’s, N.L.
“We’re going to push our governments, all three levels, to do the right thing. Regardless of our skin colour, we matter,”
said Melissa Robinson, cousin of one of the murdered women, emphasizing what many see as the systemic racism underlying the refusal by Manitoba’s provincial government to support the search.
Lobbying for the search began after a Dec. 6, 2022, statement by Winnipeg Police Service
Chief Danny Smyth stating that his forensic experts had made the “very difficult decision” not to search the Prairie Green garbage dump for the remains of
two missing indigenous women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran. They are presumed to have been murdered in mid-March 2022 by serial killer Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man also charged with killing two other aboriginal women.
Chief Smyth said it wasn’t feasible to search the landfill given the passage of time since the remains were placed there, the huge volume of material deposited there in the intervening time, and the serious physical dangers associated with excavating the site.
This didn’t prevent most Winnipeg media, all opposition political parties, trade unions, the Manitoba Museum of Human Rights, many indigenous organizations, and the federal government from repeatedly making a compelling moral case for excavating the landfill, stridently challenging the decision not to do so by Premier Heather Stefanson’s provincial government.
So have the close relatives and other supporters of these women, relentlessly and rightly reminding us that no one deserves to have their loved ones buried in a garbage dump as if they were nothing but garbage.
No one with an ounce of compassion could disagree with this sentiment. No democratic government concerned with the well-being of the people it represents, including their emotional health, could deny or minimize the pain—and abandonment—felt by the aggrieved families and their supporters.
But the government and police must also make hard choices about allocating their scarce resources using reasoned practicality, albeit tempered by political expediency, as a guiding principle.
And, yes, the inherently incompatible domains of politics, reason, and emotion will inevitably collide when controversial decisions need to be made, compounded by a tug-of-war between individual wants and collective needs.
These incompatibilities were well demonstrated when Premier Stefanson
told Global News in July: “I’m also a mother. I can empathize with those families. They’re out advocating for their loved ones, and I respect that. ... We made what was a very difficult decision. We may disagree on the decision that’s been made, but I think we can all agree on one thing, that this is a horrific tragedy that’s happened — not just to the families, but to the community, and to other high-risk individuals who are living in our communities. I want to make sure that we’ve got the proper programming in place to help those individuals through this, these difficult times, to ensure this doesn’t happen to more families in the community.”
“Proper programming” to reduce the outrageously high and ethnically skewed provincial level of murdered indigenous girls and women would mean making tough financial choices in a deeply indebted province, an observation challenging Stefanson’s assertion that the cost of searching the site was not an issue. The possibility it could cost $184 million—most of it coming from provincial coffers, given the federal government’s rigid position that the search is solely a local responsibility—would adversely affect “proper programming” and other budget considerations. This says Stefanson’s money claim lacks credibility.
Based on comments by many experts, so does her claim that excavating the site would threaten the safety of the personnel doing so, a concern implicitly based on a doomsday version of the precautionary principle.
Nevertheless, the factors she has only mentioned in passing—search feasibility and the criminal charges against Jeremy Skibicki, the 35-year-old man charged with murdering the women—are indeed practical challenges to conducting a search.
Contesting any appeal to practicality is that management of the investigation is now in the hands of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC), a body made up of 62 of the province’s First Nations, whose leadership is demanding a search despite the verdict not only of the Winnipeg Police Service but also the RCMP that doing so was unfeasible because, in all likelihood, it would not yield any human remains.
Reinforcing these two independent assessments are the universal
principles of natural justice and their
application in Canada which say victims, their families, and their close supporters must not be allowed to control any investigation with criminal underpinnings. The AMC nevertheless appointed a feasibility study committee (FSC) whose nine-member indigenous oversight sub-committee also included representatives of the two affected families. A committee with a membership predisposed to conducting the landfill search is hardly the basis for impartial decision-making.
The technical sub-committee of the FSC contained two forensic experts. However, the landmark 2019
Paulsen and Moran study had its warning that “a search should not be initiated if more than 60 days had passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated” arbitrarily rewritten in the feasibility report as: “Paulsen and Moran (2019) caution initiating a search when more than 60 days has passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated.”
Converting “don’t do it” to “be careful” points to a lack of professional competence, if not objectivity, in a search that would exceed the 60-day limit by 10-fold were the Prairie Green investigation to start as early as September of this year, with the first physical excavations earmarked for six months later, as estimated by the report.
Federal officials have undoubtedly dissected the feasibility study in the same way as provincial officials and may now be desperate for an exit strategy out of a hopeless search based on committee membership and research advice that are both problematic. Hence, they have shifted all blame to the province.
In July, then-minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Marc Miller even called the Manitoba government’s decision “
heartless,” and that it had damaged, if not destroyed, the federal government’s ability to help with the search—as much a smokescreen as Stefanson’s preoccupation with safety issues.
This is because
Stefanson told reporters on July 6 that Manitoba would not object if the federal government led the way on a search that assured worker safety. “You need to go and ask them what is their plan, what is their intention moving forward,” she said.
Landfills are provincially regulated, but Stefanson said the search is up to the federal government.
But this acrimonious and
nearly unprecedented exchange between a federal minister and a province premier seems misplaced because it would be the AMC, not the federal government, that would be in charge of the search, just as it totally controlled the feasibility study.
It is inconceivable that the provincial government, as much as it is now floundering on indigenous issues, would block the AMC’s control of the search if the feds came up with all the funding, even
if this compromised the charges against Skibicki.
This unseemly politicization has been exacerbated the AMC’s Aug. 18
call for Stefanson’s resignation because of her government’s refusal to support the search based on a section of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that doesn’t seem to apply to the repatriation of undiscovered human remains the state has no possession of.
Meanwhile, the conundrum has become a front-and-centre issue in the upcoming Oct. 3 provincial election.
All this has overshadowed the fact that a search, which could take up to three years, is unlikely to detect identifiable human remains buried under some
60,000 tonnes of decomposed and compressed debris.
With so little chance of bringing a measure of much-needed emotional closure to the families of the deceased, this has been transformed into a search without a cause, save the search itself.
Along with its political fallout, still unknown is whether emotion will overpower reason or vice versa in this Hamlet-like mess.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
