Warrior Life by Pamela Palmater

Author:Pamela Palmater [Palmater, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2020-10-09T15:09:32+00:00

26

Why Canada Should Stand Trial for Tina Fontaine’s Murder26

From a human rights framework, Canada is culpable for a 15-year-old Indigenous girl’s death. This may upset criminal law experts, mainstream political commentators and online haters, but sadly it is a fact.

Tina Michelle Fontaine was a 15-year-old Anishinaabe girl from Sagkeeng First Nation, northeast of Winnipeg. Thelma Favel, the aunt who raised her, described her as polite and funny, someone who made people laugh all the time. Tina, however, also carried a great deal of pain from the loss of her father, Eugene Fontaine, in 2011. Two men pled guilty in 2014 to manslaughter and were sentenced to nine years each in his beating death. Family members say Tina was finding it difficult to cope with her father’s death. Her aunt, Thelma, tried to get her into counselling, but says she was turned away by several child and family services agencies.

Tina had been struggling to write a victim impact statement that was to be used in the sentencing of the men convicted in her father’s death when she left her community to visit her mother in Winnipeg. Her aunt, not hearing from her, contacted Child and Family Services. In the days before her murder, Fontaine had come in contact with Winnipeg police, Child and Family Services and paramedic services. She had been placed in a hotel by social workers before she was reported missing on August 9, 2014. Her body was pulled from the Red River eight days later. Police were reportedly looking for another Indigenous man when they found her.

It would not be until more than a year later, in December 2015, that police would arrest Raymond Cormier, a drifter with a history of criminal convictions, in Vancouver and charge him with second-degree murder in Fontaine’s death. On February 22, a mostly white jury found him not guilty. The verdict marked the second time in as many weeks that a jury found white defendants not guilty in the deaths of Indigenous young people. On February 10, a Saskatchewan jury cleared farmer Gerald Stanley in the 2016 shooting death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie.

Following the Cormier verdict, which has hurt and angered Indigenous Peoples across Canada, criminal law experts rushed to defend Canada’s justice system. The Winnipeg police, whose handling of the case has received heavy criticism — the evidence against Cormier has been described as “thin” — took the unusual step of issuing a statement defending their investigation as “extensive.” Lawyers have also weighed in to reject claims the justice system is stacked against Indigenous Peoples. Some members of the mainstream media engaged in a not-so-subtle form of victim blaming, citing Fontaine’s use of drugs and alcohol to suggest she was somehow responsible for her own death.

Tina was a child. She did not die because her father was murdered. She did not die because she was suffering in pain from her father’s death. She did not die because she wasn’t living with her mother, as she was lovingly cared for by her auntie.

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