The question before the Missing Women Inquiry in Vancouver is whether police and prosecutors in effect allowed the killing of women to go on and on because they held dismissive or discriminatory attitudes toward prostitutes and drug addicts.
The inquiry, headed by Wally Oppal, a former appeal court judge and a former provincial attorney-general, has been beset by controversy. But it may still prove worthwhile if it gets to the bottom of why police seemed unable to track the stories circulating in the Downtown Eastside of a notorious pig farm – and if it airs the stories of the murdered women that have not been told yet in a public forum. (Pig farmer Robert Pickton was tried for and convicted of six murders, but is believed to have killed at least 27 more women.)
One of those stories is of Tiffany Drew, who had a “buddy” system with another prostitute, known as Ashwan. When Ms. Drew disappeared in 1999, a frantic Ashwan told Elaine Allan, an employee at a drop-in centre called WISH. Ms. Allan told the Oppal inquiry that she paged a police officer from the Vancouver Police Department’s Missing Women’s Review Team.
That police constable denies having spoken to Ms. Allan. In Ms. Allan’s account, they spoke the day after Ms. Drew’s disappearance, and the constable said Ms. Drew would eventually surface. When pressed over the next few weeks, the constable insisted (according to Ms. Allan) that Ms. Drew was trying to break her addiction by staying clear of her cronies from the Downtown Eastside. Ms. Drew’s DNA was eventually found on a syringe filled with windshield-wiper fluid when police searched Mr. Pickton’s farm in 2002.
The inquiry is examining the lives of the most vulnerable citizens. As Mr. Oppal said, “If there’s one thing this inquiry can do, it can show the community out there that the women who were on the Downtown Eastside who died tragically were real human beings. They were mothers, they were daughters, they were aunts, they had people who loved them.” But that is just a beginning. The inquiry needs to determine whether those human beings received equal protection of the law.
