Election fever is in the air in Manitoba among those most determined to incite a change in government.
Things don’t look good for the Progressive Conservative government led by seasoned politician Heather Stefanson who is serving her first stint as Premier. The next election will be held on October 3, and nearly all opinion polls show the NDP in the lead.
The smell of blood has seen an informal alliance of the federal Liberal Party government, indigenous activists, left-wing academics, and local media to dethrone Stefanson, ghoulishly employing the heartbreaking murder of four indigenous women as their latest talking point.
Niigaan Sinclair wears three of these hats – Anishinaabe activist, associate professor of native studies, and Winnipeg Free Press columnist – which he feels gives him leave to say Stefanson “wears the stink of cruelty” for refusing to support the search of a landfill site for the remains of two allegedly murdered women.
The political gaslighting of Stefanson began not long after it was revealed on December 1, 2022, by the Winnipeg Police Service that Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man, had been charged with the tragic first-degree murder of four indigenous women, including 39-year-old Morgan Harris and 26-year Marcedes Myran.
This was followed by a December 6 statement by Police Service Chief Danny Smyth, who said that though it was believed the remains of Harris and Myran were at the Prairie Green Landfill just north of the city, his forensic experts had made the “very difficult decision” not to search that garbage dump after determining it wasn’t feasible to do so. This was because of the passage of time and the large volume of material deposited there, exacerbated by serious physical dangers associated with excavating that site.
An additional RCMP study, only recently made available, supported these assertions.
But the danger of searching for and near impossibility of finding the remains of these homeless women, seemingly more cherished in death than they were in life, did nothing to prevent this tragedy from descending into near farcical political grandstanding.
On February 8, 2023, Marc Miller, the minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, allocated $500,000 to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) “to examine the feasibility of a search” for the two women’s bodies.
The AMC quickly appointed a Landfill Search Feasibility Study Committee (LSFSC) to conduct the study. Its nine-member Landfill Search Feasibility Study Oversight Committee was composed solely of indigenous people, including representatives of the two affected families.
The composition of this body is troubling. In the interests of scientific objectivity, accountability, and transparency, the still officially secret feasibility study should have been led by disinterested parties. Instead, the decision to search, an effort that would take between one and three years at a cost of between $84 million and $184 million, was predetermined.
These crude estimates are a window into the other shortcomings of the study.
The composition of the Oversight Committee is also questionable because it could very well subvert the murder charges against Skibicki: the universal principles of natural justice and their application in Canada say that victims, their families, and their supporters must never be allowed to control any criminal investigation, regardless of how much sympathy they may engender.
Yes, the Technical Subcommittee of the LSFSC contained two forensic experts. Still, the landmark 2019 Paulsen and Moran study saw its warning “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 as “Paulsen and Moran (2019) caution initiating a search when more than 60 days has [sic] 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 objectivity, if not questionable ethics, in a search that would exceed the 60-day limit by 10-fold, were the Prairie Green excavation project begin even as early as mid-August of this year.
On July 12, Miller called the Manitoba government’s decision to fund or otherwise assist in the landfill search “heartless” and callous and that it had damaged, if not destroyed, the federal government’s ability to help with the search.
“The federal government’s willing to help. We’re willing to play a role, a very important role in this. But … the government can’t nationalize a garbage dump or the waste-disposal system for the City of Winnipeg,” he said.
The next day, Miller added the federal government cannot step in unless the province gave its jurisdictional permission.
None of these statements has any credibility, especially given that the federal government would only serve as paymaster for a search that would be micromanaged by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, just as the search for thousands of reputedly missing Indian Residential School students believed to be buried in unmarked graves across the country has been controlled by local Indigenous bands.
Stefanson immediately fired back, defending her decision not to search the landfill.
“What should not happen — must not happen — is the continuing politicization of this awful tragedy. This irresponsible approach can only compound the suffering of the families, inflame wider community issues and threaten matters already before the courts [the murder charge against Skibicki].”
For the first time, she also added the critical issue of feasibility.
“As the Premier of Manitoba, however, I also have other responsibilities. These have required that government address difficult considerations on the viability of a search of the Prairie Green Landfill. Based on an objective review of these issues, we have made the difficult decision that such a search is not viable. There can plainly be no guarantees on the outcome of an exceedingly challenging and complex search, and the immediate and longer-term human safety and workplace risks involved cannot be ignored,” she wrote in a statement.
Marion Buller, a retired judge who led the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, just jumped into this political swamp when she opined that Ottawa should take a larger role in the controversy over the province’s refusal to lead and fund the search.
Buller said the federal government could sidestep the provincial government and try to reach an agreement with the landfill owner to conduct a search: “There’s so much more that can be done and should be done by all levels of government, rather than sitting back and playing some sort of blame game…. Let’s just put politics aside and get the work done,” Buller said.
But Buller seems ill-informed about the key issues.
Waste Connections of Canada, owner of the Prairie Trail facility, has fully cooperated with provincial authorities by, among other things, immediately closing off the section of the landfill where the women’s remains are believed to be buried. As for the province of Manitoba, Stefanson has declared that search costs were not an issue and the province would not prevent the federal government from ordering a search as long as worker safety was assured.
On the other side, federal officials have undoubtedly dissected the landfill feasibility study and are now desperately looking for an exit strategy out of a hopeless search based on a feasibility study that doesn’t pass the smell test. Scoring some cheap anti-Conservative Party political points by an uncouth and nearly unprecedented gaslighting of Stefanson in the weeks leading up to the October provincial election must have seemed like a nice added bonus.
Similar attacks may backfire on sundry Aboriginal parties shouting “Heartless Heather” as the silent majority of Manitobans becomes aware of the weak evidentiary underpinnings of a painful tragedy that should have been grounded in lots of objectively factual evidence.
Instead, an increasingly skeptical populace has been shown only proof that raw emotion, intense anger, and insatiable financial demands continue to trump the search for truth in our increasingly “woke” purge of Enlightenment science and logic, especially when this involves the fate of underclass indigenous women.
Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at The University of Manitoba.
