Last evening The Fifth Estate, a Canadian news/documentary program, aired an interactive program about the kidnapping of the son of a Vancouver millionaire. It was a true story, and well done, and viewers could participate by making on-line decisions during the program.
As the real-life drama unfolded, we saw how the Vancouver Police, plus the RCMP, and others, put up to 400 SWAT team members into play, raiding up to 14 locations after the eighth day, as no ransom demand had been made. It ended well; they found the boy safe, and the family was reunited cheers from allover the country. It was interesting that the family was an inter-racial one, with a Caucasian father and an Asian mother, with children who took on the best looking characteristics of each gene pool.
However, the inter-racial nature of the family stirred an old memory in me. This inter-racial boy was hunted and found with the expenditure of millions of dollars of public money. Beside that fact, I saw the shadows of over 60 Aboriginal woman who disappeared off the Vancouver streets over the last 20 years. Families missed them, cried for them, and reported them missing. But nobody in authority looked for them. No significant public resources were spent trying to find them. Of course, no ransom demand was made for them. But none was made for Graeme McMynn either. What made the difference?
Well, for one thing, they were Aboriginal woman, many were street prostitutes; nobodies. Secondly, they were women - women of no consequence, apart from being mothers, sisters, daughters, and some, wives. Another huge factor; they were poor. They had no money, they were resourceless, unimportant to the economic life of the City and the Province. Nobody public cared about them.
It was only when their corpses began turning up on Robert Picton's pig farm, when the unconcern and incompetence of the Vancouver Police Department began to come to light, only when it became obvious that their lives were so under-valued that their cases had been buried and ignored for decades, did the public authorities become embarrassed and confused, and - finally - took some action.
The McMynn case, and the Picton Case; bookends for the Canadian reality that, when you get to the bottom of it all, we don't much care about poor people, about murdered women, or about people of Aboriginal heritage. We care about money, and those who have it. We can overlook the racial card, if there's money in the background.
The Fifth Estate program was well done, and gripping, and cleverly interactive. And they have also done at least one program on the murders of the Native women. But last night was their season finale, their 'going out blast.' We'll remember the McMynn family and their happy ending. Who remembers even one name of the 60 Aboriginal women murdered and buried among the pig slop on Robert Picton's farm?
As the real-life drama unfolded, we saw how the Vancouver Police, plus the RCMP, and others, put up to 400 SWAT team members into play, raiding up to 14 locations after the eighth day, as no ransom demand had been made. It ended well; they found the boy safe, and the family was reunited cheers from allover the country. It was interesting that the family was an inter-racial one, with a Caucasian father and an Asian mother, with children who took on the best looking characteristics of each gene pool.
However, the inter-racial nature of the family stirred an old memory in me. This inter-racial boy was hunted and found with the expenditure of millions of dollars of public money. Beside that fact, I saw the shadows of over 60 Aboriginal woman who disappeared off the Vancouver streets over the last 20 years. Families missed them, cried for them, and reported them missing. But nobody in authority looked for them. No significant public resources were spent trying to find them. Of course, no ransom demand was made for them. But none was made for Graeme McMynn either. What made the difference?
Well, for one thing, they were Aboriginal woman, many were street prostitutes; nobodies. Secondly, they were women - women of no consequence, apart from being mothers, sisters, daughters, and some, wives. Another huge factor; they were poor. They had no money, they were resourceless, unimportant to the economic life of the City and the Province. Nobody public cared about them.
It was only when their corpses began turning up on Robert Picton's pig farm, when the unconcern and incompetence of the Vancouver Police Department began to come to light, only when it became obvious that their lives were so under-valued that their cases had been buried and ignored for decades, did the public authorities become embarrassed and confused, and - finally - took some action.
The McMynn case, and the Picton Case; bookends for the Canadian reality that, when you get to the bottom of it all, we don't much care about poor people, about murdered women, or about people of Aboriginal heritage. We care about money, and those who have it. We can overlook the racial card, if there's money in the background.
The Fifth Estate program was well done, and gripping, and cleverly interactive. And they have also done at least one program on the murders of the Native women. But last night was their season finale, their 'going out blast.' We'll remember the McMynn family and their happy ending. Who remembers even one name of the 60 Aboriginal women murdered and buried among the pig slop on Robert Picton's farm?
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