Front Burner - ‘They had the nerve to smell her breath’

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Today we examine a scathing watchdog report — which condemned the RCMP for racially discriminating against Colten Boushie’s mother — and the narratives that shaped the case.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm Jamie Poisson. It was pure torture.

Felt like we were swept under the carpet. We were never going to get justice. When were we going to be heard? That's how it felt. Felt like I was forever fighting a battle that could never be won. This is the time that we step up now and we tell you the injustice and the racism in the courtroom, the discrimination needs to stop. Things need to change. We need to change for the future generation. I refuse for my grandchildren to be in

fear, live in fear of the RCMP, of the justice system that doesn't exist for the natives. Things need a change. The change is called now. We're tired of waiting. This is Debbie Batiste. She's speaking at a press conference on Monday about an independent report that vindicated what she's been saying for over four and a half years. Since the day her son, Colton Boushey, was shot and killed on August 9, 2016. And there is now an independent RCMP watchdog report. It has concluded the police force did make mistakes during the investigation.

The commission found officers racially discriminated against Colton Bushi's mother after the shooting. That officers asked if she had been drinking and even smelled her breath. I did not deserve to be treated the way I was treated. I did not deserve to be treated the way I was treated. Guy Kenville is a reporter at CBC Saskatoon who's been covering this story, and he joins me now. Guy, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So can you tell me about how Colton Bouchie's family, and particularly his mother, who we just heard from, responded to the findings this week?

What was her main message? We've been waiting for this justice for a long time. Well, she felt vindicated because her mistreatment by the RCMP, the insensitive way that they notified her of her son's death and searched her house is something that she had aired concerns about fairly early on, but she felt like those concerns were just swept aside. And there was also some frustration on her part that it's taken so long for the CRCC's findings to become public. I'd like to thank all the people that supported, prayed for us throughout this journey. But then mixed within that was also some hope because she said, you know, as frustrating as her own experience was and as torturous as the wait for answers was, she encouraged other people yesterday, other Indigenous and BIPOC people to speak out about their own experiences of mistreatment and racism. So anybody that's been treated with this injustice, that you stand up and you continue to fight, have hope.

If Colton could hear me now, he'd be proud that we continued fighting and we never gave up. Yeah, it was really heartbreaking, but also a beautiful speech that she gave. And you mentioned the CRCC report. This is the RCMP Watchdog, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission. And I want to get into exactly what this report found in just a few minutes. But first, it's been almost five years since Colton Boushey was shot and killed. We're learning lots more this morning about what happened during a fatal shooting on Tuesday afternoon near Bigger. He was, of course, a young Indigenous man, 22 years old.

And remind us, Guy, I know that there are so many details in this case, but briefly, the circumstances around his death. What do we know about what happened? Yeah, so Colton was from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, and he and four other friends from that reserve drove onto Gerald Stanley's property that day. And a confrontation ensued, the details of which were quite contradictory, as heard during trial testimony. as heard during trial testimony. But basically, an altercation occurred that resulted in J.L. Stanley shooting Colton at close range while Bushi was seated in the front driver's seat of an SUV. The trial took place in early 2018, and the jury ultimately found Stanley not guilty of either second-degree murder,

which was the charge he was up on, or manslaughter, which was a lesser charger that the jury could have found him guilty of. Instead, the jury completely acquitted him, and that sent ripple effects throughout the entire country. What do you remember about being in the court when that verdict came out? Well, it's a scene I will certainly not soon forget. As soon as people realized what that jury foreman had said people started screaming, breaking down. They were yelling things like murderer, screaming for justice and soon... I'm shocked. It's a terrible feeling to hear not guilty.

This has been very difficult, but we will continue to seek out justice for Colton. We tried, but now the world knows. The world knows. And, you know, these ripple effects that it sent throughout the entire country, I think our listeners will probably remember. Between the RCMP's behavior and the second degree murder trial of Gerald Stanley, tell me a little bit more about what made this story such a controversial case. Well, yeah, to start with, there was the fact that the jury that heard the evidence in the case did not, it seemed, include any Indigenous members. Now, we at the CBC cannot verify that fact, but by all accounts, there were no visibly Indigenous people sitting on a jury, which makes the verdict that resulted, complete acquittal, the subject of so much debate and discussion after the trial. But, you know, Colton Boushey's family, and particularly his mother, Debbie Batiste, had aired concerns about the whole experience, and in particular, how they were treated by the RCMP far earlier than the trial. In fact,

shortly after the shooting, Debbie Batiste's family filed a complaint with the Saskatchewan RCMP about how they had been treated by officers after the shooting. Now, the Saskatchewan RCMP about how they had been treated by officers after the shooting. Now, the Saskatchewan RCMP conducted its own investigation of the family complaint, but ultimately cleared officers of any wrongdoing when it came to their interactions with the family. This left the family very dissatisfied. And so they turned to the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for an independent review, both of how they were treated by the Mounties, but also how the RCMP handled Colton's shooting investigation. This brings us now to their report. And what were its biggest

findings? So overall, the CRCC found that the RCMP's investigation of the shooting was professional and reasonable, but there were some major issues found within that. And the biggest is that the commission ultimately believed that Debbie Baptiste was racially discriminated against by members of the RCMP. Debbie Baptiste and her family were treated with discrimination the night that her son was killed. The RCMP, they went into her trailer without a warrant. On the night of Colton's shooting, about five hours later, seven RCMP officers drove to the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, where Debbie Baptiste lived, and approached her trailer with guns drawn, with their vehicle lights flashing on her home. And they were there to do two things at the same time, a really awkward combination of things by the commission's account. They were there to tell her that her son was dead, but also they were

there to search her home for what they believed was a witness to the shooting, one of Colton's friends who had fled the shooting scene. So what the commission found was that the whole way that the RCMP approached her home was unreasonable and insensitive. It took on a tactical nature that the commission felt the RCMP should have been more mindful of, especially when you take into consideration the historically fraught relationship between Indigenous and BIPOC people and the RCMP and other police services. The commission says that whole approach came across as inherently confrontational.

But then there's the whole matter of what happened once officers actually went into Debbie's home. So according to the commission, seven officers went to the home, three went to her door and asked if she was Debbie Batiste, Colton Boushey's mother. She said yes. And then one of the officers said, your son is dead. When she fell to the floor after they told her her son was dead, they had the nerve to smell her breath. Debbie collapsed to the floor.

One of the officers asked if they could go inside. Notably, he didn't ask if they could go inside to search the home, just to ask if they could go inside. So they move inside and Debbie falls to the floor again. And it's at this point that one of the officers says to her,

They told her to get it together. And also asks if she had been drinking. Wow. Also at some point during this interaction, Debbie has mentioned that she had put her son Colton's dinner in the microwave from when he came back home. And the commission agreed with Debbie's account that one of the officers actually went inside the microwave to check to see if she was telling the truth.

If that doesn't speak of discrimination and racism, I don't know what does. This whole interaction is really the crux of the racial discrimination that the CRCC backed up. nation that the CRCC backed up. Now, I should point out, Jamie, that none of the officers were counted hearing those comments about whether she'd been drinking. But, you know, the CRCC interviewed 10 civilians, including family members who were inside the house. They also talked to over 30 officers. And unlike the Saskatchewan RCMP, which initially investigated this complaint and either could not or did not support any of Debbie Batiste's allegations about what happened inside the home. The CRCC did a complete 360 and said, no, we believe her. And this is what happened, according to our final findings, which is huge.

I understand that the report also addressed media releases sent out by the RCMP after Colton Boushey's death. And can you tell me about that? This is another big part of why the family felt they were mistreated. They felt that some of the initial press releases that the RCMP put out to the public put a disproportionate amount of focus on some of the property offenses that Bushi's friends were initially charged with. This caused anguish for the family because the releases left the impression that Colton's killing was justified or that his death was deserved. Those charges were ultimately dropped.

But, you know, their issue was that the first press release came out and it indicated that a shooting had happened. But there's very little information on what was ultimately a homicide investigation. homicide investigation. Very little information about the killing of a person and more information about the potential property offenses that happened that day. They felt that those releases portrayed Colton as a thief and that even though the commission found there was nothing factually inaccurate in those releases, the sort of piecemeal way that they released information about the incident fed a narrative that was seized upon publicly, especially on social media. The RCMP's own words fueled the online hate that this family and the Indigenous communities across Canada had to endure. They felt like that set the tone for a really awful public discourse about what happened

on the farm that day. And that set the entire tone for the country to spit hatred at Debbie and her family, to spit their racism. One of Colton's brothers told the commission that he felt like the Boushey family name was ruined as a result of those releases. This report, it obviously came with some recommendations. And what were they? So the commission recommended that all RCMP officers across the force receive cultural sensitivity training. And on the media release front, one month after the shooting, the Saskatchewan RCMP immediately made a change when it came to media releases. It started having Indigenous members of the RCMP review drafts of media releases having to do with serious incidents involving Indigenous people before those releases went public. Now, the commission said that it would like that change to happen nationwide at all RCMP detachments.

Okay. And how did the federal RCMP and the Saskatchewan division respond to these findings and recommendations? So part of the whole CRCC process is they come up with these findings and recommendations, and then within their final report, the RCMP commissioner, Brenda Luckey, actually responds to those and says, yes, we agree with these findings and these recommendations. And here's what we're going to do, or in many cases have already done to address those concerns. And it should be pointed out that Luckey agreed with virtually all the findings and recommendations made by the commission. agreed with virtually all the findings and recommendations made by the commission. Even so, ever since yesterday, the national headquarters for the RCMP hasn't made any sort of official statement. They have referred people to a statement that was put out by the Saskatchewan

division of the RCMP on Saturday. And that statement said it found that the findings and recommendations were important in terms of establishing the public's future confidence in the RCMP. Baked in that statement, you know, was a defense of the members involved in the Bushi case. You know, they said they were acting at all times with the best of intentions. But overall, Saskatchewan RCMP said, you know, we've adopted 16 of the 17 recommendations that are in our power. We hear you and we're working on it. I know that there were also criticisms of the RCMP for destroying case evidence, like recordings and transcripts of telephone calls. They destroyed communications from August 9th, 2016. And we'll never know what are on those communications. We'll never know what

was said between the members. And is that right? Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, that was one of the more interesting side revelations buried within the commission's mountainous report. So the commission had requested a number of telephone recordings, as well as, you know, inter-RCMP communications, only to be told that that documentation had been destroyed by the RCMP because of a policy they have where after two years, materials not found to have any quote-unquote evidentiary value are thrown out. And the CRCC was particularly mystified and disappointed by that revelation because it says the RCMP knew of the CRCC probe before the end of that two-year period. So they wanted to know, you know,

why they didn't have all this other material to work with. Right. And I know that there have been criticisms because there's also a civil case that the RCMP also knew about. You mentioned before the RCMP's response to this report. The union, I understand, for the RCMP took a very different stance on the probe. And what did the union say? Yeah, completely different response from the Saskatchewan RCMP. The union essentially flipped the table on the conversation and took direct aim at the CRCC's work. It denounced the report and its findings, painted them as overly broad. It even questioned the commission's ability to rule on the question of racial discrimination. It said that the commission made a number of

errors and omissions, that it was inherently biased, and that has not been received well by the family or its lawyers or the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations here in Saskatchewan. In fact, based on the comments made by the union and its president, Brian Sauvé, on Saturday, they are asking for him to be fired over his response to the report. Okay. Guy, thanks for this. You're welcome. In the Dragon's Den,

a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. I want to bring in another voice today. Gina Starblanket is a Canada Research Chair in the politics of decolonization, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, and co-author of Storying Violence, Unraveling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial. Gina is a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan. Hi, Gina. Thanks so much for

being here. Hi there. Thanks for having me. So I know that you watched this entire process play out. And what was your reaction when you read the report? Well, you know, there was a certain level of validation and relief in reading some of the findings, because, of course, they affirmed, you know, what the Bouchy family and the Baptiste family had been sharing all along about their experience with the RCMP. And, you know, what many even, I think, supporters of the family and external observers noticed about sort of errors in how justice was carried out following the death of Colton Boushey. And so while I think that it provided a sense of relief that those experiences were now being taken seriously, it's also sort of bittersweet because it's unfortunate that it takes this sort of lengthy external review, you know, for Indigenous people's experiences on the prairies to be taken seriously and to be taken

at face value. And of course, we just talked about with Guy, the union representing the RCMP is pushing back quite strongly here. Yeah, I really think that speaks to the sort of the safeguards that are in place to really protect against any sort of conversation, critical conversation of their members. I think it's really unfortunate that the role that unions are playing today essentially involves pushing back against systemic issues like racism and saying that this should have, you know, this never should have formed part of this review, this shouldn't have been part of their mandate. In this sense, unions have sort of lost sight of some of their history and their lineage. You know, they emerged in some contexts, you know, to provide protections against racialized members of organizations and institutions. And now

they seem to be very whitewashed and just be pushing back against, you know, the possibilities to open up these sorts of conversations around systemic and structural change in ways that would sort of implicate their membership. We just talked about how the report addressed media releases from the RCMP, and I want to talk to you more about this today. The report was very clear about how damaging and discriminatory the very first RCMP press release about the death of Colton Boushey was.

And can you talk to me more about the narratives that emerged immediately after the shooting? What story was being told here? Well, even in those initial press releases, we saw the story being crafted as one of, you know, potential theft, potential violation, trespassing on private property, rather than, you know, a focus on the Boushey family and essentially the theft of their loved ones, their relatives' life, right?

The media narrative focused on criminality, troublemaking, and those sorts of themes, rather than taking this up as a potential murder investigation. And how did those stories persist in the trial? What narratives relied on there? Well, you know, in the trial, there's always this sort of process of determining what stories and what facts are relevant and important to the case. And so one thing, you know, that I really take up in the book, Storing Violence, is how there's certain stories of white, rural, prairie life, these narratives of sort of hard work, industriousness, even isolationism that sort of gives rise to a necessary vigilantism that you know circulated

heavily in the trial and that you know absolutely would resonate for the all-white jury members who also are largely drawn from surrounding rural areas so we see those those narratives at the fore but then we also see selective bracketing off of any of Indigenous people's narratives of what life is like on the prairies in that region. Jida, I know this is something that you have spent quite a bit of time looking at, and can you tell me more about where these stories come from? Absolutely, yeah. So in the book that we wrote on these narratives, we work to historicize their roots in early immigration campaigns, in early sort of imagery and ads that were promoting settlement to the prairies in the early years of contact and sett fertile, open landscape. All that it's requiring is going to be, you know, a hardworking family to come and develop the property

and make a life for themselves that wouldn't be possible in their homelands. And so we used a lot of that imagery and particularly the heavily racialized nature of those immigration campaigns and the heavily racialized narratives that started to build early on in prairie, well, rural prairie life for settlers to trace that lineage and talk about the origins of, I think, the ideas, the sort of mythologies of settler life in the prairies,

but also those very early stories that people were being told about Indigenous deviance, Indigenous criminality, and so on. Hmm. You know, I know that you've also written extensively about the fraught dynamic between police and Indigenous people in the prairies. And what do you think people need to fundamentally understand about the roots of this mistrust and conflict? Well, they need to understand the role that the RCMP originally played in prairie Indigenous life. And that role was to quell what was perceived as Indigenous resistance against nation building and the establishment

of permanent settlements in these spaces. But for Indigenous people, it wasn't resistance, right? It was protection of those ancestral relations. It was protection of the treaty relations that we entered into and our understanding of what those treaty relationships entailed, right? Those weren't an agreement to surrender the land and enter into relationships of political subordination and be sequestered onto reserves.

If people start to understand the actual nature of treaties, they can understand that Indigenous people were really just enacting and seeking to protect our own jurisdiction, our own governance and legal systems historically and up to the present day. One of the originary roles of the RCMP was to place parameters and contain the exercise of Indigenous peoples' legal and political authority in these spaces. The recommendations in this civilian watchdog report that was just released, do you think that they go far enough? No, I don't. I think that, you know, the recommendations around mentorship and cultural sensitivity training and cultural awareness training you know they don't need to learn about what a medicine wheel is or what a powwow is i really don't think that sort of awareness will bring forward the the levels of transformation that we need to see given this

extremely fraught relationship again both historically and something that's very much ongoing in the present. I think that we need to have broader conversations around structural change. We need to have anti-racism training, anti-violence training at the very, very least. Okay. Gina, thank you so much for this. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for this. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right, so some news from Ottawa before we say goodbye. The day that we've all been waiting for has finally been announced. The government will present budget 2021. The next federal budget will be tabled on April 19th at 4pm. Finance Minister

Krista Freeland made the announcement during question period on Tuesday. This has been a long time coming. It's been about two years now since the Liberals delivered a full budget. So we'll definitely keep you posted on this front. That's all for today, though. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.