GANGS, ROBERT PICKTON, AND WALLY OPPAL

The Missing Women’s Inquiry is a good example of how to hold a huge public inquiry, spend lots of money on lawyers (all for the police, none for the murdered women’s relatives) and yet not discover one relevant thing that wasn’t already known.  Sometimes I am almost grateful for the time I have spent in the women’s prisons in BC over environmental issues.  Those long months, three and a half years’ worth all told, incarcerated with women in the trade and other occupations, have given me a perspective on BC politics that I probably never would have gained anywhere else. However, what I learned there was not comforting.

Still, without this association with so many women who have been blamed, cursed, damned and destroyed, I would never have been conscious of the huge part that criminal gangs play in our society.  Certainly one did not hear a whisper about any possible gang connections in Oppal’s inquiry.  So I will tell you out loud what the women in prison told me and you can make up your own mind.

 Among other things, the women in prison told me that gangs were behind the murders of the missing women whose DNA was found on Pickton’s farm. They told me that the women were murdered, dismembered, and hung on meat hooks and eventually fed to pigs in the process of making “snuff” films.  And they told me that some of the police knew about the film making and the murders all along and for whatever reasons, deliberately refused to investigate the killings as long as they could.

Mad, scrambled, criminal rantings from mad, scrambled, criminal women?  Perhaps.  But, In the first place the women who talked to me in prison were not mad.  They were addicts, but they were not mad.  Nor were they criminal in the broad sense of the word.   In the main, they were survivors of the street.  And in the main, they were First Nations, victims all, of losses of such magnitude that non- aboriginals can’t even begin to fathom them.  But when Wally Oppal spoke of these losses in his report, he pointed fingers at society as a whole as being indifferent to the losses of First Nations women.  There is an element of truth in this accusation.  However, I believe Wally Oppal is using this as a smoke screen, along with police incompetence, to divert attention away from the reasons the women were murdered.

This is the main element in the Pickton trial itself that gives me pause...  Robert Pickton’s lawyers got his charge of first degree murder reduced to second degree.    How did they do this?  By convincing the jury that Robert Pickton could not have killed all these women, dismembered them, and fed them to his pigs all by himself.  Pickton’s lawyers convinced the jury that Robert Pickton had help in all of this, that other people were involved in the women’s murders.   If the jury believed this, and recommend that the charge be lessened, and the judge accepted this, then where are the investigations into who the other murderer(s) might be?  There were no investigations then or now.   Well, what about media investigations as to why there are no ongoing investigations to find the other accomplice(s)? Why aren’t independent investigative reporters bugging the government about looking for the other accomplice (s)? 

And most importantly why didn’t the Attorney General demand an investigation into the possibility of other accomplices immediately after the trial? Police and the RCMP don’t have to wait for the outcome of any possible appeal, or the outcome of anything, to investigate criminal activities.  In fact, why wasn’t this search given the highest priorities?  And why was Wally Oppal given the job of conducting the no- nothing inquiry in the first place?   He was the Attorney General while much of the murdering of the women was going on.  Talk about a conflict of interest.

I believe Wally Oppal was the choice to head the inquiry because the BC Liberal government wanted a no- nothing inquiry.  Wally Oppal fit the bill as he was part of the problem the Liberals wanted to deny.  In my opinion The BC Liberals seemed to fear any connection between possible gang activities around the Pickton murders both then and now.   I think the BC Liberals picked Wally Oppal to head the inquiry because they knew he would scuttle it.  And why would the BC Liberals want this?  Because they were afraid of any information coming out that might reveal the power of the criminal gangs in relation to much that goes on in this province, including the Pickton murders.   

Enough of this. The killing of approximately fifty women (Pickton’s boast and I believe him) on a pig farm with their bodies afterwards fed to his pigs is not something that a no-nothing inquiry can gloss over and then we can all forget about. We need a federal inquiry into the most depraved, nightmarish, grisly serial killings that have happened anywhere in the world.  If Canadian First Nations and including Canadian citizens in general are refused a federal inquiry then the refusal could be taken to the United Nations.  The UN would not refuse, they could not refuse.  The entire world has to look at this case.  The injustice of it is just too wrong, too inhuman to be borne quietly.  And we don’t have to bear it quietly.