Madam Speaker, it is an honour and privilege today to come to the House from the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation to speak about Bill C-3, an act to amend the Judges Act and certain aspects of the Criminal Code.
I agree that we are going to have unanimous consent moving the bill forward. It is a very important piece of legislation. Judges need to be educated about sexual assault and about these issues. However, I would put it to the House that the issues that have come up with judges asking inappropriate questions of women who have been sexually assaulted, those questions would not be asked of white women who are the daughters of judges, mayors, chiefs of police or members of this chamber. Those questions are asked of women who are marginalized, women of colour and indigenous women.
The speech I heard from the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre talked about the sexualization of indigenous women and girls, and how that perpetuates violence against indigenous women. We need to do much more than amend this act. The missing and murdered indigenous women and girls inquiry has called for a task force to deal with a whole range of outstanding cases. Even to get before a judge to talk about sexual assault, there is the need to have the RCMP or police force investigate the case properly and bring forward charges, and then have those charges approved by a prosecutor.
I want to talk about a case that happened in my community. This is an 18-year-old case of a 21-year-old woman named Lisa Marie Young. In 2002, on June 29, she went out with friends, drinking, partying in town. She was at a local nightclub. At the end of the evening, she went to another party and then off to get something to eat. She was driven away by a young man in a maroon-coloured Jaguar.
She called friends to tell them that this person was not letting her go and that she wanted to leave. However, her friends, who were intoxicated, did not think to call the police or to raise attention.
The next day, Lisa Marie Young was nowhere to be found. She had very close ties with her family, her mother and father, Joanne and Don, and with her friends. People phoned the RCMP right away, and they started to raise awareness about her being missing. An RCMP officer came by and had a discussion with them, but then went away. He was away, off duty, for five days. When they talked to someone else, that person said they should give it 48 hours. They said it was an extremely unusual situation. She had actually phoned a friend and said that she was being held against her will.
This young woman and the stories swirling around her have all been brought back to light because of a podcast put out by a journalist, Laura Palmer, called “Where is Lisa?”
It is very clear that the police did not respond in a proper way. This was a young indigenous woman. The police did not do a ground search until September 17. She went missing on June 30 and the police did not engage in a ground search until September 17. It was members of her first nation, the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation of the Tofino area, those family members, who conducted searches on their own, without the aid of the RCMP.
The RCMP did not interview anybody from the nightclub this young woman was at. They did not interview some of her friends. They did not do a Crime Stoppers video until 2009. The family had been asking for a Crime Stoppers video about Lisa's disappearance, and they did not go through with that until 2009. They made sure there was a good likeness of Lisa on that Crime Stoppers video, but the young man in question, Chris Adair, who was driving that Jaguar, a preppy-looking kid from a privileged family, was made to look like a street tough. They botched that.
The police handling of the car used to drive Lisa to her death location is another issue. The Jaguar reportedly was not examined by the RCMP until after the owner, a well-known realtor in Qualicum, had it steam-cleaned and detailed. If this young woman had been the daughter of a judge, a mayor or a member of the House, that would not have been the case. The police would have been all over this right away.
The RCMP dismissed an urgent call from a witness who is believed to be an associate and accomplice of Lisa's killers who called to alert the Young family that Lisa's body was being moved at the moment it was being moved from the original location. The RCMP ignored that call, basically saying that she was not a credible witness, mainly because she was tied to criminals, there might have been drugs involved and she might have been street-involved.
As I said, the people at the Jungle Nightclub where Lisa was last seen were not interviewed, neither were the staff. The RCMP failed to respond to other members of the public seeking to provide information on Lisa's disappearance or murder. In some instances, police have entirely failed to respond. In other instances, their response has been delayed.
One informant, a former associate of the prime suspect believed to be Lisa's killer, one of several responsible in her death, called the RCMP in 2006 to report details of Lisa's murder, a videotape of the crime and more. What people have said about this case is that Lisa was taken to make a “snuff” film. They said she was drugged, sexually assaulted and then killed by accident, that it was not the intention to actually go through with the whole process, but she apparently died in the process. The people who know about this have come forward to talk about it, but because they are all associated and known to police, and known to people who are known to police, it has not been investigated properly.
It is also suspected by people in this community that the prime suspect in this case was a police informant. This echoes what happened in Nova Scotia. The killer in Nova Scotia was suspected of being a police informant, and police have no obligation to release any of that information or to talk about that information.
There are multiple issues of concern with this case. The prime suspect did a polygraph, which the police said he passed. Lisa Marie's mother, Joanne, was taken to the Parksville Police Station to take part in an interview with Chris Adair, who was the last person known to see Lisa alive. She was told by the RCMP to hug Chris. Who does that? How does this happen?
This is an outrageous case, and Laura Palmer has outlined all of this in a seven-hour podcast. Once the podcast was released this summer, the RCMP started actually doing some interviews of people. However, this case just goes to show why the missing and murdered indigenous women's inquiry has called for a task force to be looking into these cases to find out why the RCMP and other police forces have not gone through the proper procedures of ensuring that these cases are investigated properly. These young indigenous women who have been murdered, mothers, daughters, sisters, have not had their cases taken seriously.
We need to do a lot more than educate judges. We need to deal with bringing justice to our justice system for all, because it is not justice for all right now. This is a system that prioritizes people who count in the eyes of the justice system. If Lisa Marie Young had been a white woman and a daughter of a prominent business person in this community, that case would have been investigated properly.
I am challenging the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations to get this process going with this task force to look into these cases of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. I invite them to come and talk to me. I will bring this family forward, and they can tell them their story. They can give them all of the information that they know, and the names of people involved in this case. This is an outrageous case, and I know that there are other cases like this across Canada.
I am thankful for this time to be able to speak about this.
