Feb. 15, 2022: CBC – A lawyer representing three of the nine First Nations families involved in the Broken Trust reinvestigations has serious concerns about the process just as it begins to wrap up, with Ontario’s chief coroner saying a final report is expected “within weeks.” While the reinvestigations were supposed to put families first, said Aboriginal Legal Services program director Jonathan Rudin, their clients have instead been “ignored” and largely left out of the process.

Now that the nine reinvestigations have been completed, a final report has been prepared and will soon be presented to the embattled Thunder Bay police oversight board, Huyer told CBC News, speaking on behalf of the executive governance committee charged with overseeing the process.

That report will provide a summary of the work done and will respond to the recommendations made in the Broken Trust report, Huyer told CBC News.

But Rudin said he hasn’t heard about a timeline for that report, nor does he know what exactly will be included in it. “If people are serious about transparency, if they’re serious about trying to repair trust — or create trust frankly — between the Indigenous community and the Thunder Bay Police Service, that’s done by actually letting people know what’s going on,” Rudin told CBC News.

The family lawyer said he sent an 18-page letter to the executive governance committee overseeing the reinvestigations in January 2022, raising a range of issues about the multi-year process, including:

• Concerns about how the investigations were done, including a reliance on lie detector tests.
• Why families were not interviewed at the beginning of the process to determine what they wanted to see come from the reinvestigation of their loved ones’ deaths.
• Not sharing final investigation reports prior to a meeting between the families and the teams that conducted the reinvestigations.
• Not providing translators for family members whose first language is not English.
• The inclusion of Thunder Bay Police Services officer Chris Carson as the investigative team’s family liaison, despite the fact he was one of two Nishnawbe Aski Police Services officers involved in the 2010 death of Romeo Wesley in the Cat Lake First Nations nursing station.

Rudin also said there are outstanding questions about Thunder Bay police Chief Sylvie Hauth’s role in the drafting and review of the final report, given her decision-making role on the executive governance committee.