Good morning, everyone.
My name is Bernadette Smith. I'm from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
My sister is Claudette Osborne. She's on this poster here. I was going to bring a picture, but I didn't know if they would let me in with the glass or not. This is my sister here on the end, and we actually know every single one of these families. We've connected in Manitoba in the same way that Sharon is talking about, doing the work supporting these families, because there's not enough support out there for these families, and it shouldn't have to always be on us to do that.
My sister went missing July 24, 2008. When my sister went missing, she was reported missing, but it was 10 days before her case was even looked at. My other sister, Tina, was told that she was probably out there somewhere; that's what the police told us, that they weren't going to do anything right now, that she'd turn up, she always did. My sister was exploited at a very young age. She used drugs to cope.
Claudette wasn't a person who wouldn't keep in contact with her family. She always phoned someone. She was really close with my sister Tina and stayed with her a lot of the time, but Tina hadn't heard from her.
A report was made, and 10 days later.... Only because we started putting pressure on the police did they start looking into her case. We found out a few days later that my sister Claudette was at a hotel on McPhillips and that she had been with a long-distance truck driver. At that point, my sister had just given birth to her youngest daughter, Patience, who was two weeks old when her mother went missing.
My sister was not well. She was hemorrhaging from giving birth. Her baby was apprehended at the hospital, even though she had gone into treatment for 10 months and had been working toward changing her life and making it better for her kids. But after spending eight months in treatment and giving birth to her child, our system didn't feel that was enough. They took her child.
My sister's partner moved to Emerson, Manitoba, just to get her away from the pressure of what goes on in the city and the drugs. They had a son together. She had been living in the home with her son as well. They had visits back and forth from the treatment centre my sister was in.
When they apprehended her daughter from the hospital, they gave her partner a choice: either Claudette would go home with him or Patience would go home with him. They talked about it. Matt wanted Claudette to come home because he knew that together they could work to get Patience back home with them, and that she needed to be home for their son, Iziah. So Claudette went home.
But the pressure of the guilt was too much for her. She left Emerson and went back to the city. She went back to the street and to drugs.
That night she called my sister Tina. She said that she was with this truck driver and that he was trying to push himself on her, and that she felt unsafe and wanted to be picked up.
But my sister had a pay-as-you-go phone and she didn't have minutes on it so she didn't get that message until a couple of days later when she put minutes on it. That's how I knew my sister was at this hotel. At this hotel they had video surveillance so when the police went to investigate my sister's case, and finally went and visited this hotel, it had been written over. The evidence was gone.
After that we had to continually...it was very one-sided. We were always calling to find out if there were any updates on Claudette's case. We weren't asking for information on the case because we know that they can't give that out. What we were asking for was some accountability to us, to say that they were working on it and that they were actively out there searching for her. Communication broke down and we had to get the chief of Claudette's first nation to come out and facilitate dialogue with the police and us.
It was ten months before.... My sister had a phone card, not a physical phone card but she knew the number of it. We had told the police that she'd had this number and that perhaps she used it when she had left the hotel and that would provide some answers. Because of our laws and the Freedom of Information Act and whatever else, they weren't able to get a warrant to access those records. Ten months later they were...after diligent work and our family constantly putting pressure on. And there were numbers on there that were disconnected. My sister was addicted to drugs, she was on crack cocaine. There were numbers on there that were tied to alias names, so it would be “Jack Frost” for instance. By the time they accessed those records those phones had been thrown away, they were no longer in service. Again, valuable information had been lost because of policies that are in place.
My sister is now a part of a project called Project Devote in Winnipeg. This project came out of families feeling like there wasn't enough being done in our city. What happens in Winnipeg is there are four missing persons investigators and on any given day they have more than 80 cases that they are investigating. How do four officers investigate 80 cases and give each one of those cases the attention they deserve?
It's so frustrating because it's not that they are not doing their job; we know that there are officers out there who do care and who do the best they can, but there are limited resources.
Claudette has been gone now for five years. We don't know where she is and we don't know what happened to her. We don't have any answers.
It's just really hard not knowing day-to-day where she is. I think we lose ourselves in doing for others, because it's all we know. It's really hard for us, because we get so wrapped up in doing, doing, doing, and sometimes we don't take care of ourselves and we need somebody else to do it. We need more resources out there for our police, for our women who are in domestic relationships. We need more resources for our women to get off the streets. My sister waited a year to get into treatment. She tried continually to get into treatment. It took a whole year. Now you tell me.
I just want to say thank you for listening and inviting us here. I really hope that you take what we're saying, what we're sharing, and you put it into something, but not into a report. I'm tired of reports. I'm sorry. It's report after report that sits on a shelf somewhere. I want tangible action. I want something to come out of this that you're going to take and you're going to actually put into place so that we're not increasing these numbers.
I have an 11-year-old daughter, and she's five times more likely to walk out the door and be murdered or not come home. That's not fair. Somewhere, and I always go back to that reconciliation.... Our people have been pushed and pushed and pushed, and we're still being pushed. We're peaceful people.
Thanks for listening.