Welcome. My name is Warren Greene I'm an Ojibwe two-spirit Indigenous activist
and today we're here to just talk about the recent happenings of the murders
and missing in the Toronto LGBT community. Today with me I have Susan
Gapka, Doug Elliott and James Dubro and they'll all be coming up and briefly
talking about issues that and that are concerned to us. I wanted to do today to
acknowledge the land and water that we're a part of here the Huron Wendat, the
Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee and as well currently the Mississauga's
of the New Credit. So I wanted to just welcome you all and introduce Doug Elliott
who is a lawyer in our community and elder as he calls himself.
Good morning everyone thank you for coming and thank
you Warren. First of all my name is Douglas Eliot
and first of all I want to make it clear that while I am and have been connected
with a number of community groups over many years today I'm speaking as a
private citizen and as a lawyer. This morning I'm publicly calling on Attorney-
General Yasir Naqvi to immediately appoint a public inquiry under the
provincial inquiries act into the Toronto Police Service investigation of
the recent serial killings of gay and bisexual men in this city. The time for
that inquiry is now. Our community is grieving. Our community is angry. As
recently as last December we were being told by chief Saunders that our
long-standing concerns about a serial killer preying on our community
were not based on any evidence. He was wrong. He
had a legal duty to warn us and instead he reassured us. It now seems that there
was plenty of evidence but somehow the Toronto police struggled to put two and
two together. We want to know what went wrong. We deserve to know what went wrong.
The relationship between the Toronto Police Service and Toronto's LGBT
community is at its worst since I joined in the protests in the streets out here
against the bathhouse raids back in 1981. Nothing short of a full public
inquiry is going to put us back on the necessary path to reconciliation with
the Toronto Police Service. Serial killers are rare but there will be
another one. Perhaps the next time it will affect a different marginalized
group. Will the police bungle again? There have been previous inquiries for example
into the Bernardo case and into the Pickton case. Did the Toronto Police
Service learn the lessons from those cases? Somehow I doubt it and
if we ask ourselves are there more lessons to be learned from this
investigation I think most of us could agree that there really can be no doubt
about that. Twenty years ago Justice Archie Campbell and the Bernardo inquiry report
was blunt in his observations that clever serial killers are a recurring
and serious challenge to modern law enforcement. Ontario is not immune to
them. Our law enforcement agencies have repeatedly failed to develop modern
investigative systems to detect and apprehend these savvy predators at an
early stage. These killers continue to outsmart our
law enforcement officials for far too long before they are caught.Why are
police always two steps behind instead of one step ahead? The mayor and the
chief have both said that they would welcome a public inquiry. I applaud the
internal review already underway at the TPS and the external review that the
mayor is seeking tonight after consultation with respected community
groups like ASAAP. Even the attorney general himself agrees that there ought
to be a public inquiry. The question is when? The attorney general has said that
we should wait for the, quote, "conclusion" unquote, of any and all criminal
proceedings. Such a lengthy delay is both unnecessary and completely unacceptable.
The conclusion of the criminal proceedings may be many years in the
future. We cannot wait until the criminal justice system has completed its work.
The police have said that their investigation could take many more years.
It's already been going on for eight years. How long should we give them? While
I respect the man the attorney general is wrong. There is no need to wait. First
there's no legal reason to wait. I believe there's a lot of
misunderstanding and misconceptions about this point and I am here this
morning in part to clear that up. I've been involved in two major public
inquiries both involving fatalities. The Krever inquiry and the more recent
Elliot Lake inquiry into the mall collapse there. In both of those
inquiries criminal investigations proceeded in parallel to criminal
investigations. Criminal investigations running parallel
with public inquiries. In fact in the two inquiries in which I was involved the
police had not even gathered enough evidence to lay any charges by the time
the inquiries got underway. In this case the police already have enough evidence
to lay six charges of first-degree murder against an identified accused. Ever
since the Supreme Court gave its blessing to this two-track approach in
the Westray mine case this two-track approach has been the usual, the
preferred approach. There is no legal reason to depart from the two-track
approach in this case. Second there is no practical reason to wait.The inquiry
would be about how the investigation was handled, not about helping the police to
gather evidence to help secure a conviction. The inquiry should focus on
the events leading up to the charges laid in this case. Those events are a
matter of historical fact and they are not going to change as a result of
anything being done by the police now. As the families of the Pickton victims noted
at the inquiry in that case, the passage of time only causes memories to fade and
evidence to deteriorate. Not to mention the anguish those families and friends
experience. That is especially so in this case. The known victims were middle-aged
men. The oldest 59, just a little younger than me. We can
anticipate that many potential witnesses will be of similar ages and possibly
even older. If we wait ten or more years to get started, as happened in the Pickton
case, those witnesses might not even be able to give evidence. We will all suffer
immensely waiting for answers. An inquiry is not going to stop or even
impede the criminal investigation. No one — no one — is
asking for that investigation to be put on hold. An accused person has been
identified and he is not going to be released from custody
just because an inquiry is launched. He's not going anywhere. Of course we all want
the police to identify all the victims and to lay all of the appropriate
charges. However let's face it: if convicted of any of the charges that
have already been laid the accused man will never leave prison alive. More
charges will not change his fate. Chief Saunders expressed surprise to the Globe
that there was a serial killer at work in Toronto. He said it was something he
watched on CNN and it did not happen here. That was a pretty shocking
statement. The Bernardo report warned our police to expect serial killers again in
Ontario and Bernardo's crime spree began right here as the so-called Scarborough
rapist. Apparently the chief never learned
anything from the Bernardo report even though he himself worked in homicide for
many years. However let me be clear: this is not about shaming the police it is
about making sure that they do a better job the next time. We should learn from
the mistakes made in BC. The Pickton inquiry was delayed for 10 long years
while the criminal justice process unfolded. The inquiry report was not
released until 2012. It found there was a botched investigation that was hampered
by outdated police techniques and police procedures, not to mention systemic bias
as the victims were viewed by the police, in the words of the commissioner, as
"throwaway people." Did unconscious bias play a role here? By 2012, when the Pickton
report was released, at least three gay or bisexual men had fallen victim to
a serial killer in Toronto. Project Houston was launched that same year.
Sadly, Project Houston was shut down 18 months later with no arrests. The
killings continued. I have to ask myself: did the Project Houston officers even
read the Pickton report? While we now debate the timing of an inquiry into the
most recent serial killer investigation the next serial killer may already be at
work, perhaps even right here in Toronto. We need to learn the lessons from this
unhappy investigation and we need to learn them without any further delay.
Lives are at stake. Thank you. I'm very sorry I cannot stay
for questions. I have business commitments. I've left my business cards
and a copy of my statement with my friend James and you should feel free to
contact me. I'm not trying to avoid the journalists or community members here
today but I do have other professional commitments. Thank you very much for your
attention.
Thank you Doug. Now we'll have Mr James Dubro speak. He's a crime reporter and
researcher and a longtime member of our gay community here in Toronto. Good
morning. That's a lot to digest there in what Doug said and there's a couple
areas where I'm going to overlap and I'm not going to speak very long. I just
wanted to read a couple of points from our position paper. Lives at risk today
in particular from our marginalized communities under the rainbow.
Shortcomings in how police collect, store, coordinate and share data appeared
to have allowed Bruce McArthur to continue to murder. McArthur was charged
in 2001, questioned in 2013 and again in 2016, with incidents that
we now know are relevant to the case. But none of these connections were made in
time to prevent a series of deaths, deaths that may have otherwise been prevented
given the proper systemic improvements. That's point number one. Project Houston,
which is Doug had just said, should not have been shut down. Like
homicide investigations, the series of disappearances and involved with Project
Houston make it clear that the project should have remained open and rather than
project Prism being created, Houston should have continued as more
information ultimately came in which perhaps might have prevented future
deaths. Very important. The third point I haven't actually written out because
it's still evolving and it has to be and it's not one it's not position paper but
this has to do with the fact that McArthur had a criminal record for
violently attacking a hustler in the gay village. And he was brought in as I just
said in these two instances, but the criminal record doesn't appear to have
popped up when the when he was questioned by Houston or when he was
questioned by an officer investigating an attempted murder that he was charged
with. Now I have found out just today really that the reason that may not
have popped up on police investigations is that he had got a pardon for his conviction
which was a serious conviction. That's fine, but the problem is not even police
intelligence seems to have had access to those, that the fact that he was
convicted of violence in the gay community. Because if they had, that would
have been a red flag right away when he was brought in Houston that would have
made him a person of interest and also when he was brought in for the
attempted murder. It would have been a extremely important thing. And yet it's
just amazing to me, inexplicable and amazing and incredibly
inept that the police did not have access to their own records. We have to
find out, that's what an inquiry will help us find out. That's all I'm going to
say right now. Thank you, James. We'll now have Susan Gapka speak she is a
community and trans activist also independent as well. Thanks everyone for
being here. I'm Susan Gapka. We've released a statement.
Just a situation that has brought us here today, reluctantly appearing before
you, but feeling there's a lot of unanswered questions around this as
Douglas and James have already spoken to. I just want to first say that my . . . still
my thoughts and my prayers are with the
the murdered and missing people, the families and friends and everyone
negatively impacted. And partly what I want to talk today about is to bring an
equity lens to the conversation to talk about Dean whose — and Alloura Wells —
whose systemic discrimination and other social factors led them not to be taken
as seriously when they went missing by the authorities and that needs to change.
And we need to do more work on that but also of the situation that put them in
extremely high-risk situations. As a former street kid myself I can really
relate to it. And actually I was re-traumatized. I had visited a number of the
places that Dean himself had been involved with back more than 20
years ago before I actually did get off the streets. So I just wanted to just
sort of give them a moment of appreciation or not appreciation but
a moment of remembrance, commemoration, for that and I'll do that just in a few
minutes. The other thing I wanted to bring to the conversation was we can do
a lot better around that and even I'm not qualified to speak around race and
some of the other factors involved in the other missing people but actually
as Douglas and I were talking yesterday about, there are a series of public
inquiries and I worked in the mental health field and we brought, taken the
police to task in coroner's inquests and time and time again a set of
recommendations are not adhered to, are not implemented and still we have people
going missing and not found or found in this manner. This is unprecedented. But if
you were in training to be — I don't want to use a serial killer analogy — but in
some ways these inquests the police should have been following the
recommendations of previous inquests. This would be a guidebook on how to get away
with murder if you were trying to do it and that's what happened in this case it
seems. That there was a — it happened many years later before we
finally brought that police broke the case and of course it's not to shame the
police — they actually broke the case and the person is alleged until proven
guilty but it looks like a heap of evidence is going to keep this
individual locked away for a long, long time. The other piece that I wanted to
talk about was the relationship between police and community members. It said, I
think it continues to be strained. Last time it was G20, there was
the G20. Before that the Pussy Palace but what happens is before that, before my
time the bathhouse raids. There's a long history of disconnect between LGBTQ
two-spirit, non-binary members and the police services so they really need to
do better on that. I first met James when we formed the chief's consultative
committee and the original terms of reference for that committee was to meet
in community settings, to have members elected by community members, by
organizations and for the last number of years they've been meeting at police
headquarters. And as you know there's intent there's higher security measures
recently so many of us do not feel comfortable going to police headquarters
to engage with the police. They need to be more visible in the community and less
visible in other ways. So we need to do a lot of work on police relations and I
have reached out to some members I'm on the CPLC at 51 Division and one of
the sergeants down there I talked to him yesterday so we really need to somehow
figure out that we can report people when they go missing or report crimes or
or violence without fear of prosecution and violence from the police
themselves. And there's a whole undercurrent of activity in the LGBT
community are systemic and historic marginalization, our criminalization in
the past make us some of us very, very hesitant to do that. So I just wanted to
highlight that we really need to do better on that. Just as I close here
I just wanted to take a moment of silence for I realize this is not your
real moment because there's media in the room but I am gonna start my timer and
if we could just think about just have that moment
and then we'll go to questions, just around for the missing and murdered
rainbow community members. Just wanted to add again we are individuals we're not
representative of any organization and that's how we came together today. So
let's have that moment now please
Okay I think we're almost ready for questions. Thank you for that moment of
silence. This is . . . as we leave here today let's just remember those because
it's going to be, this is going to take some time and it's been very traumatic.
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