MMIWG national inquiry loses family member's file
Jenny Lay says she received an email on Thursday saying she has to redo the intake process
The daughter of a murdered woman wants to know how her file with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Women and Girls "was destroyed by accident."
Jenny Lay received an email on Thursday from a health support co-ordinator informing her that her intake must be redone.
"I don't even really know what they lost," said Lay. "I just thought another failure on part of their communication."
The 23-year-old said she replied immediately, giving the co-ordinator her phone number, but has yet to hear back.
The email said: "You had completed an intake with the inquiry and I am writing to ask if we can redo the intake. Your file was destroyed by accident and we realized this quickly after it was gone. Therefore, to avoid any delays I would like to call you to complete the intake with you."
"He was released pending trial and later that year in September he actually killed himself," she said. "So there was never any actually closing trial or anything, just the preliminary hearings."
Lay was four years old when she lost both her parents. The family was living in Grande Prairie, Alta. at the time and Lay and her older sister moved back to Manitoba to be raised by their mother's sister.
She said growing up she never really considered that her mother fit into the statistics of missing and murdered Indigenous women. When she became a teenager she started hearing other people's stories that were similar to her mom's.
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"My mother's story involving domestic violence and drug abuse ... having a hard lifestyle and living a hard lifestyle," she recalled. "I feel like I didn't really see that until I was in my late teens and realizing that yeah, this has impacted me a lot in my life."
A 2014 RCMP report said police had identified nearly 1,200 missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, but the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, Carolyn Bennett, has said the number is "way, way higher," but officials say getting a more complete picture will require connecting with families.
Last summer Lay connected with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs' Families First Foundation and decided to register as a family member with the National Inquiry.
"They wanted to know my story. They wanted to know my mother, where she was from, what circumstances she had been in previously," said Lay, adding she spent around an hour and a half on a recorded phone call with a commission lawyer in April.
"It felt very formal ... like they were trying to find out the facts than allowing me to tell my story," she said. "But that is understandable considering that they are looking for facts ... I felt like it could have some sort of beneficial impact."
Lay said she never received another email from that lawyer and has since been contacted by three different staff members.
"I had asked several emails about health supports and what was going to happen from then on and I just never received a reply," she said.
Lay called the inquiry process "sloppy" and said she is losing faith in it because of a lack of communication. Lay said she is not looking forward to retelling her story again, especially because it was already recorded.
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"It`s very [hard] because you get triggered, you remember a lot of things and it's pretty traumatizing considering a lot of these disappearances and murders are done in a very traumatic way."
Inquiry says file 'inadvertently deleted'
On Saturday, a spokesperson for the Inquiry responded to a CBC News request for information about what happened.
"In the course of transferring an administrative document to our new computer system, the document was inadvertently deleted," director of communications Bernée Bolton wrote in an email. "However, no personal details of Ms Lay's story or any other documents or evidence was deleted. We have taken measures to ensure this does not happen in the future."
On Thursday, four Manitoba Indigenous groups called on the inquiry to have Manitoba representation on its executive and to create a regional subcommission.
It wasn't the first time concerns have been expressed about the inquiry; in July, Marilyn Poitras resigned as commissioner in July; later this summer, First Nations chiefs rejected a call for the inquiry's four other commissioners to step down.
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The first formal public hearing was held in Whitehorse in May, but subsequent hearings were pushed back. They're now set to begin Monday, Sept. 25 in Smithers, B.C.