The Learning Curve - What is an Inquest?

Hi, everybody. My name is Andy Boucher, and yes, I'm the host of the Learning Curve, but I'm also Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, which I just shared with you in Ojibwe. Now, I don't know about you, but when I'm in a conversation with somebody and they use terminology or phrases or even another language in that conversation, it makes me really nervous or uncomfortable, especially if that discussion or conversation is going to have some bearing on my future. Now, the learning curve has always been about sharing information to help you to understand so you don't end up in those situations. And today is no different. Today, I'm going to introduce you to Chantelle Bryson. Now, she's a lawyer here in town, and I don't know about you, but if there's one area where I'm really not sure of the terminology, it's anything to do with the legal system. They use phrases and words that I've never even heard of before. And these are the words we're now seeing in newspaper articles. And they're coming up in our conversations. Now, sometimes we admit to not understanding. Other times we pretend we know. Today, I want to help you to truly understand some words that have come up. Chantel was involved in the inquest into the deaths of the seven youth here in Thunder Bay. We're going to talk to her today about what is an inquest? What's the difference between an inquest and a trial? Is there a judge? Is there a jury? What kind of information can you share? And is there restrictions on what can be shared? So, as always, grab your favorite coffee, tea, whatever, head for that favorite chair and come back in a few minutes as together we walk through the learning curve. Hi, everybody. Once again, I'm Sandy Boucher and welcome back to the Learning Curve. And today we're here with Chantelle Bryson. Thank you so much for coming out today.

Thank you for the invitation.

Oh, you are most welcome. I'm sorry. So anxious to ask you these questions because as the audience knows, often I bring people on that I know fairly well. I know about their work or whatever. But when I did up the questions for today, it's like, no, seriously, I need to know this. I need to understand this. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation. But before that, I always like to introduce and focus on the fact that we're people first, that it's not about topics, it's about people. So. So I don't know the answers to these questions. So. Are you from Thunder Bay?

I am Not. I am from southern Ontario, a little town called Exeter between London and Grand Bend. After my ba, I went out west and up to the Yukon I'd always wanted to go. I met my husband there, who's from Terrace Bay.

And Scriber, you met him in the Yukon and he's from Terrace Bay. Right, okay.

Right. And so we stayed there for a few years and decided we would raise a family here. But I stopped. We stopped in Winnipeg for law school in Ottawa for a year, clerkship. And we've been here for 15 years.

You chose to raise your family in Thunder Bay?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Yeah. And you know what? Honestly, so, so often on this show, whether I'm speaking to indigenous or non indigenous, either they were born and raised here, or they were born here, left and came back, or they chose to be here. So there's something here. We have to fix this other stuff.

Yes, we have to fix this other stuff. And for us, it was very much the outdoor lifestyle. My husband grew up in that lifestyle. We worked at wilderness lodges and such things. So the easy access to that lifestyle was a big piece.

Awesome. Awesome. So you were involved in the inquest. You are a lawyer here in Thunder Bay?

Yes.

And you took part in the inquest in what capacity? I don't want to put words in your mouth here.

Right. So I represented the provincial advocate for children and youth, and the provincial advocate, under its statute has a mandate to. For individual and systemic advocacy for children in care on the margins of care and First Nation children and youth on and off reserve.

Wow.

So that's their statutory mandate. And more particularly, I don't know if you know, of the Feathers of Hope Project. So I represented the Feathers of Hope youth in particular, who actually directed my role in the inquest in terms of areas of exploration. Exploration and questions, evidence, recommendations, the youth themselves. I had an advisory committee that I would meet with and they led the way.

Wow. Okay, so I'm going to start off with a really crazy question. Okay, so what is the difference between an inquest and a trial?

Right. So an inquest is one of the oldest legal procedures known in sort of Eurocentric culture. It goes back, I believe, to the 14th century. And it's presided over by a medical doctor, a coroner. Not a judge.

Okay.

Right. And you have a jury in Ontario's case under the Coroner's Act, a jury of five that is selected the same way other juries are selected, really. And they have a very specific mandate. The jury has to answer five questions in terms of a deceased who, where, when the Medical cause of death as well as the means of death. So unknown homicide, suicide, accident, natural causes.

Wow.

And then they have the option to. To deliver preventative recommendations for similar circumstances or matters arising out of the inquest. So the coroner presides over the proceeding and determines the admissibility of evidence, the relevance of evidence, what they call the scope of the inquest. He sort of writes out a scope of areas of evidence you're allowed to explore, but it is actually the jury that makes the determinations on the five questions and the preventative recommendations.

Okay, I do have one question. As soon as you mention jury. As we know, it's been brought up several times about indigenous people going before a court or a jury that doesn't. It's supposed to represent your peers. Right?

Right.

At least in a criminal case. Right. And indigenous people aren't serving on juries. So in the case of an inquest, are we seeing the same kind of problems?

And that was the delay, a large part of the delay in starting this inquest. This inquest originated with Reggie Bushy's family calling for an inquest back in 2007. Then it grew to include the other deaths up until the 2011 death of Jordan Moore Boz. But at the same time, court case was going on about jury representation, which was taken up by the families as well as another family with an inquest going on. That led to what they call Project Invite, which came out of former Supreme Court Frank Iacobucci's report on jury representation, where Nan and their legal counsel travel to all the Nan communities to invite people to go onto the jury list.

Oh, wow.

Where they may potentially be selected for the inquest. And then the coroner's office had Ontario pass a regulation that permitted or not permitted, but outlined this representation issue. And so for the inquest, the recent inquest here, we did have someone from Project Invite on the jury from a Northern community. The other four jurors, I'm not sure if they had any Aboriginal ancestry or not.

Okay. But it did come up. So a coroner's presiding. We have this jury of five who's presenting the information.

Right. So once the coroner, before the inquest starts, they write out this scope or these. The things, these are the things we can talk about. They also give you what's called a coroner's brief. And that's all the evidence the coroner's office has gathered regarding the matter. Now that it doesn't all become evidence in the inquest, it's just potential evidence that they've gathered. And then the parties can bring parties who have standing can bring forward other suggestions of witnesses and documents. Once you're at the inquest, it's the coroner's counsel. So the coroner appoints his own lawyers, who are provincial lawyers, crown attorneys by day, and in this case he had three. And so they would make the first choice of what witnesses to call, what documents to put forward forward. But every other party with standing had the ability to seek voluntary permission for additional witnesses and documents. And in the event everyone did not agree, you could bring a formal motion to argue for that to be included in this inquest. Because there were 12 parties withstanding, we did a lot of preliminary work and discussions. We agreed on the vast majority of additional evidence and witnesses that we wanted to be considered. And I think that was where local counsel were very helpful. People like Etienne Escuega for the, you know, nnec, the school board and myself, who were aware of alcohol and drug counselors, nurse practitioners, the health unit people, the Lynn people. We said, we need to bring all these people to the table as well.

Exactly. So the family had input into, if they chose, like, if they had said, I want someone to be able to speak, would that have been allowed? Yes.

Yes. And they were represented by Aboriginal Legal Services out of Toronto, right from the very beginning in 2007. So Aboriginal legal Services, with Jonathan Rudin and Christa Big Canoe, were integral to this entire inquest and to ensure, and I think everyone worked very hard to ensure that the family's interests were implemented.

Oh, good, good. So I'm going to assume there were limitations on what can and cannot be presented. Obviously, it's limited by that scope.

Right, right. It's limited by the scope, which is these are areas of potentially relevant evidence. And in this case, that was very important because we didn't know the means of death, you know, accident, homicide, suicide. No one knows how the five came to be in the water. No one knows how Paul Panocci died. Robin Harper, we were a little more clear about. So the scope was quite broad in those circumstances. And then you have to show that it's within scope and also potentially relevant to the five questions or preventative recommendations. So, for example, if you have an industrial accident and it's pretty clear what happened, it would be a very narrow scope and preventative recommendations would be very confined to that. In this case, because we didn't know there was no clear evidence at all of what had occurred. The scope was quite broad as well as the room for arguing relevant preventative recommendations. And, you know, both the scope and the Recommendations that came out, you know, went all the way back, starting on reserve and all the inequities on reserve, lack of treaty rights, implementation all the way through to what's happening in Thunder Bay.

You mentioned something and maybe I heard it wrong. So the jury comes up with the recommendations, but do they just come up with recommendations or they argued?

Well, every party withstanding is allowed to submit recommendations in closing arguments to the jury. So in this case, to make it a little more manageable for the jury, imagine they sat for nine months, heard over 160 witnesses, vast amounts of DOC, you know, hundreds or sorry, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documentary evidence on a big cart. So the parties worked really hard together to agree on as many recommendations as possible to propose to the jury. Then several parties had a series of their own separate recommendations that they put to the jury. The jury then could take those, accept them, reject them, or come up with their own. And they did all three.

Wow, that's amazing. Perfect time to take a break. So when we come back, we're actually going to discuss a little bit more about the actual recommendations, what came out of the inquest and how are we doing as far as progressing on those. So take a minute to go refill that coffee and I'll see you in a few moments. Hello again and welcome back to the Learning Curve. I'm Sandy Boucher and again we're here with Chantal Bryson today. So we were talking about the inquest into the seven student deaths recommendations. There was a whole bunch of them.

There was 145.

Okay. That's what I thought was the number, but I wasn't sure. Now, if I remember correctly, they were directed at a bunch of different people. Like there were recommendations for nnec, which is the education authority that runs Dennis Franklin Cromartie High School. Who else were the recommendations?

Canada.

Oh, the entire country. Okay. I don't think I knew that.

Ontario, Ananisi Matawa Learning Center.

Oh, right. Because Jordan.

Right. Jordan Wavaz attended Matawa ko and maybe you can help me here.

Okay. Not even gonna try it.

Kiwei Winakmakinac.

Way to go.

I think.

Yes.

So because KO actually has after school workers and stuff for the kids from their communities as opposed to nnec. After school workers, they have people who come, and not just for DFC students, but also students they have at the other high schools.

Exactly.

So Canada, Ontario, nnec, Matawake, the city of Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay Police Service. And now who am I? I'm thinking of the tables in the courtroom, those were the ones who received recommendations. There were other parties withstanding, like the Provincial Advocate and Chiefs of Ontario and the Thunder Bay Police association, but we don't, we're advocacy bodies, so we don't implement recommendations.

Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but a little while ago, and I don't remember when it was there, there was some kind of gathering. It was a report card on the recommendations.

Yes.

Am I describing that correctly?

Yes. So Aboriginal Legal Services, who represented the families, created a framework of short term, medium term, long term recommendations. Many of the recommendations were joint as well. Right. Many parties, they assigned a point value for each one and a point value if completed in progress or nothing done. They have a very detailed report of the calculations and everything on their website. And they came up out of that with a letter grade for each party that was responsible to implement recommendations. And each party who received recommendations had to report back to the coroner's office a year after the inquest. So that's how Aboriginal Legal Services was aware of what folks had done or not done for this purpose. And they held an event here at Bore Alaskan Law School to disclose their report and how they calculated it and the grades for year one.

Yeah. Are those grades? Can I access those grades? Because I don't remember who the. Who got what grade.

It's really nice. On, on the Aboriginal Legal Services website, they have the lengthy report, it's 180 pages or so that, that goes through each recommendation. They also have a nice summary report that's about 20 pages. Okay, thank you. Right. Yeah. Yes.

And the grading is in there.

The grading is in there.

Wow.

Yes.

Okay. Do you remember off the top of the head?

I do, I do. So let's start with Canada, who was, you know, the recipient of the vast amount, most vast amount of recommendations and certainly the most detailed ones starting from in home communities to Thunder Bay. They received a D. Oh, ouch. 51% in relation to their recommendations. Ontario received a C. They had much fewer recommendations, which is interesting because they do have concurrent jurisdiction. Even though people always think it's only federal, they actually do have jurisdiction. The city of Thunder Bay received a C. NNEC and Mattawa received an A minus KO received an A. Nan received a C. And the Thunder Bay Police Service received a B. But I do have a caveat on that because we know the difficulties with the training exercise and so saying something's done isn't necessarily the same as the value of getting the value from it.

Right.

What has been Done.

You have that discussion all the time, the checklist. You can't just say you took cultural awareness training, if nothing else.

Right.

Or it didn't sink in or whatever.

And if someone goes back to the actual recommendations about training, they were reflective of the TRC, I believe, number 57 or 58. So not just cultural competency, but human rights, residential school history. It was very detailed. So I don't think that training happened. Like, I don't think Walk A Mile necessarily covers everything in the resident recommendation.

Exactly. And again, trc, we mentioned that last time when Travis Hay was here. So that's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations. And I get. I am definitely doing a show on that because it keeps coming up and I know. I've read them and looked through them, and they're definitely worth discussing and talking about and keeping alive.

So several of them were directly implemented into the inquest recommendations.

Awesome. Yeah, awesome. That was such valuable information. We do have a few minutes before I'm gonna let you go. So I have a lawyer here, so I'm going to corner you on something, and I did warn you about it ahead. I'm not catching a guest off guard here at all, but it keeps coming up in conversations in this city. We are. Now, everyone can acknowledge that discussing colonialism or oppression or racism are difficult conversations. We're all learning how to do that. That's the creation of the learning curve. The fact that this is a learning curve that we're going through together. But. And especially when the whole Bay act thing hit the news.

Right.

We keep hearing freedom of information. Freedom of information. So. And people have varying understanding of what rights we have as far as freedom, information is concerned. So take your best shot at it.

Well, free speech at law is only found in Section two of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Right. So the Charter of Rights and Freedoms only applies to government institutions. Oh, right.

People would be surprised to hear that.

So it provides a protection against government sanction for your speech to the extent of reasonable limits, because everything in the Charter is subject to section one of the Charter, subject to reasonable limits in a free and democratic society. So in terms of a proactive or a positive right, that's the only one at law that exists. Of course, you're free to speak in your home or on the street however you like. In the rest of the world, our workplaces, our educational institutions, our speech is limited in all kinds of ways. Right, Right. The Charter doesn't apply to protect you there. You're limited by human rights legislation. You're limited by contracts of employment, codes of conduct. So then it really comes down to the choice of the organization, of how they're going, and of course, social media, et cetera, how they're going to limit, if they're going to limit at all speech within, whether it's a workplace or a recreational space or what have you. And there's really, there's no charter protection to that unless it's a government institution. And so, you know, there are all kinds of limits every day. And I think, you know, people throw free speech out there as a basis for asserting that every opinion is equally valid, which is certainly not the case. Someone with direct lived experience of a topic, their opinion is much more valid than someone who's never lived it. Someone who's, you know, like Mr. Hay, who's deeply involved as an academic in an area of study, versus someone who's just picking up chat at the coffee shop. Not equally valid. I think the conversation really needs to turn to that about validity and weight. You know, much like the recent kerfuffle over Steve Paikin show on the agenda and talking about Indigenous youth. I don't know if you've heard about that. Well, they didn't have any Indigenous youth on the show and they had some non indigenous folks saying they don't care about their treaty rights, they don't care about their home communities kind of like they want. Well, that's not the case. I work with Indigenous youth a lot and so I wrote them and suggested they actually speak to Indigenous youth. Chiefs of Ontario has a young people's council. Nan has a young people's council. So many opportunities and that. That would be much more valid in terms of exploring the topic than people who have no lived experience.

Exactly. Just uttering an opinion.

Right. Right.

We're coming to an end of the show. Thank you so much for that. I know what we always go back to is nothing for us or about us, without us. Right. Lived experience just applies to so many different groups and so many situations. So thank you so much for coming out today.

Thank you for the invitation, as always.

Please take the information. It was a lot of information today. Take that information and use it in those conversations in those coffee shops around your dining room table. Find out if your family understood what an inquest involves and make sure when you're sharing those opinions to consider the validity of those opinions. Together, through the learning curve, we can improve this city to one that we're all proud of. And that's what I'm hoping for. So until next time, have a great day. Take care of yourself, and we'll see you next time on the learning curve.