Manitoba government moving 'as fast as we can' on landfill search, minister says
Nahanni Fontaine says she understands delays are 'a form of torture' for families
After more than a year of debate and delay, Manitoba cabinet minister Nahanni Fontaine says her government is moving "as fast as we can" to search the Winnipeg landfill believed to hold the remains of two murdered Indigenous women.
"I understand and can appreciate how this is like a form of torture in many respects, to wait for your loved ones," said Fontaine, a member of the Sagkeeng Anishinaabe First Nation and Manitoba's minister of families, accessibility and gender equity.
"Particularly as Indigenous politicians, like, we understand it. We are not separate from what the community experiences or has experienced," she said.
Fontaine said Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew's government hopes to present a plan to the victims' families in the coming weeks, and are currently mapping out the logistics of what she called "a very complicated search."
"The premier and our government are committed to searching the landfill. It will happen," she told The Current's Matt Galloway.
In December 2022, Winnipeg police said that they believe the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran are in Prairie Green, a privately owned landfill north of the city.
Jeremy Skibicki was charged that month with the first-degree murder of both women, as well as the homicide of another Indigenous woman Rebecca Contois, and a fourth unidentified victim, named Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe, or Buffalo Woman by community members. Partial remains of Contois were found at a different landfill in June 2022, weeks after some of her remains were discovered in northern Winnipeg. Police have not recovered the unidentified woman's body, or shared details of that investigation.
The province's then-premier, Progressive Conservative Heather Stefanson, decided not to search the Prairie Green landfill in July 2023, due to a feasibility study that cited health and safety concerns around hazardous materials. The study suggested the search could take up to three years and cost up to $184 million.
On Jan. 25, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs released a new feasibility report calling for the search to proceed, arguing the delay has been "inhumane" for families who lost loved ones.
Speaking at the release of the report, Myran's grandmother Donna Bartlett said families shouldn't have had to fight for the search to be conducted.
"If we weren't First Nation people I'm pretty damn sure they'd be looking real quick," Bartlett told a news conference on Jan. 25. "If we were white, they would be looking."
Fontaine said she felt enraged to once again "see the way that Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited [individuals] are so devalued and are considered disposable."
Before she was elected as the NDP MLA for St. John's in 2016, Fontaine was an academic and vocal advocate for protecting Indigenous women and girls. She said Manitoba is "ground zero" for a national problem, and every murder or disappearance shows that "we're not moving fast enough."
When she attends vigils and memorials for slain and missing women, she can't help but notice the young girls who are in attendance.
"I always think like, 'I'm hoping that this stops, that those little girls … are not the next ones to go missing and murdered,'" she said.
"It is our sacred responsibility to do this work and to fight as hard as we can for that next generation."
A 'genocide that is alive today'
The Progressive Conservatives made the landfill decision a central facet of their provincial election campaign last October, with billboards that read "Stand firm: For health and safety reasons, the answer on the landfill dig just has to be no," alongside a picture of Stefanson. Polls ahead of the election suggested Manitobans were split on the issue, but Kinew pledged to search the landfill if elected, and became Canada's first First Nations premier on Oct. 3.
Cambria Harris, daughter of Morgan Harris, has now filed a human-rights complaint against the Conservatives about the billboards, as well as against the current NDP government over continued delays.
"[To] see your mom being used for a political game to score points and votes was distressing," Harris told CBC News last month.
Fontaine said she thinks the complaint "is predominantly about the former government."
She pointed to her government's work on the issue, including appointing a special adviser on Indigenous women's issues, and establishing a committee of cabinet to focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit and gender-based violence.
In 2019, a national inquiry concluded that Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or to go missing than members of any other demographic group in Canada. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls described the violence as "genocide," and issued 231 "imperative" calls for justice to end the deaths.
A CBC analysis last June found that after four years, only two of the 231 calls have been completed — and more than half haven't even been started.
Long-time advocate Sandra DeLaronde said that reports like these have long "fallen on deaf ears with no action," dating back to the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, which identified the violence visited on Indigenous women and girls in the 1990s.
"It's a finding of genocide that is alive today, is systemic, from generation to generation," said DeLaronde, a lecturer at the University of Winnipeg.
DeLaronde thinks the delays to the landfill search have sent a message that Indigenous women can be murdered without consequence.
"Those that take the lives of our loved ones think that they can get away with it because they have gotten away with it. Year after year, generation after generation," she told Galloway.
"Recognizing our humanity and our worth to this country … we just need to move ahead and do the work and create safe spaces and places for the whole community," she said.
With files from CBC News. Audio produced by Joana Draghici.
