An Open Letter To Thunder Bay From Ryan McMahon (the guy that made that podcast and that TV show)
An Open Letter To Thunder Bay From Ryan McMahon (the guy that made that podcast and that TV show)
All four episodes of the docu-series Thunder Bay are now airing on CRAVE TV. I'm writing this letter to ask you to give it a chance. You don't have to agree with me, just hear me out.
By now, many of you will have heard that my tv series, Thunder Bay, is now streaming on CRAVE TV. It’s a four-part docuseries adaptation of my podcast series by the same name. The project began development in the Fall of 2020 and began production in June of 2021. We shot the series through until May 2022. It is a long road to getting something on television, and we worked diligently on the research, journalism, production, post-production, fact-checking, and now, releasing and promoting the series. It’d mean the world to me if you watched and gave it a chance.
As the Executive Producer, Co-Director, Writer and Host, I speak for everyone involved when I say we all feel a sense of gratitude for those in the city who helped tell the story. Thanks to all that allowed us to film in their venues, cafes, restaurants, and other facilities. Your bravery and willingness to help us fight for something better will never be forgotten.
Thank you to the people in the city who shared their stories and talked with us. Quietly, many of you were afraid to speak out publicly; I don’t blame you. Dozens and dozens of you spoke to me off the record, and that’s fair. It’s to be expected that people don’t want to stir the pot in their backyards. Those of you that talked to me but didn’t want to go on the record, including close to twenty sworn police officers in the Thunder Bay Police Service, all share one thing, you’re all looking for a change in your city. I hope it comes as a result of this work.
Thunder Bay is a wonderfully beautiful place to shoot a tv series. The stark contrast between Lake Superior and the Canadian Shield is one of the moodiest and most cinematic landscapes I have ever seen. In one day in Thunder Bay, all four seasons can run through town, which sings beautifully on camera whether you’re shooting in Westfort, Port Arthur, or Fort William. Cinematically, we tried to shoot the city as it is, not exploiting the landscape or the people. I wanted the cameras to find the beauty of the place we love. I hope we did you proud in that sense.
Some claim I did this series to “make a profit off of Thunder Bay.” There is no such thing as profit when you make TV (or anything else) in Canada. This series has cost me more than anyone will ever know, including my mental, emotional, and physical health. I was paid to work as anyone else with a job is. The hours VS the pay never adds up when making film or tv in Canada. Ask anyone in this industry the math on the dollars in VS the time spent is never a fair trade, especially in documentary.
There are many reasons I made this series; I can tell you money is not one of them.
A REASONABLE TIMEFRAME FOR CHANGE IN THUNDER BAY?
Let me set the table for you to understand where I’m working from in this letter. Seeing what I saw, hearing what I did, and learning what I now know, I had to do something.
I released the first season of the podcast in 2018. At that time, I was concerned about the city and what was happening there. Through the making of the podcast's first season, no one in the city wanted to talk to me. No one there took me seriously. I offered what I always offer as a journalist, a chance for someone to sit down across from me and answer questions - I never have a got ya moment, there are no tricks up my sleeve, and I don’t go into interviews with a clear intention or goal - I go in curious to understand.
The podcast won awards, was critically acclaimed and was downloaded millions of times worldwide. Imagine how different the podcast would have been had it had the voices of those in charge in the city. No one in power took me seriously, no one in power thought that what I was doing was important, and no one in power wanted to talk.
Rumours become the truth by not going on the record and not talking to journalists. I wasn’t interested in working in rumour and hearsay then or now; that’s not what I do.
Deaths upon deaths pile up in the city. The Seven Youth Inquest was devastating. The OIPRD Broke Trust report is unprecedented. The OCPC Sinclair Report is dark and damning. The reinvestigations ordered out of Broken Trust should shock and appall.
The charge of systemic racism found in the OIPRD Broken Trust Report divided people in the city, particularly those in power, the police service, and maybe you.
In making the television series and in talking with dozens of cops for the show, it is clear the systemic racism charge was not understood by most.
So here is how I understand it:
The issues identified with Thunder Bay policing through this Investigation are not the result of behaviours by individual racists, which could be addressed through disciplinary, staffing and training measures. Nor do they arise from the absence of planning and policy development by the Board, which would simply require that policy gaps be filled. They are indicative of a broader, deeper and more systemic level of discrimination in which an unacceptable status quo is viewed as the normal state of affairs, maintained and perpetuated by the structure and operations of organizations and agencies mandated to oversee them.
-Murray Sinclair in the OCPC Thunder Bay Police Service Board Report
We can all agree that Thunder Bay has been through a lot in recent years. My good heart and good mind stay with the people who have lost loved ones in the city, particularly the Indigenous families and communities still grieving the deaths of people they loved.
Because of the reports' seriousness and findings, to do the work I do, I had to ask myself, “What is a reasonable time frame for change in Thunder Bay?”
I asked this question as I left the city at the end of 2018.
Thunder Bay had work to do and promised it would do it.
I returned to Thunder Bay in 2020 to see how things were going.
By then, the series had significant interest from production companies and broadcasters alike, but I had not yet developed the show with Canadaland. Before advancing any efforts on the television series, I said I wanted to return to the city and hear about the changes and progress due to the Broken Trust report.
Upon return, I asked everyone the same question, “What was it like to be in the city when Thunder Bay hit rock bottom in such a public way.” The response I received from everyone in their own words was, “If you think Thunder Bay hit rock bottom, then you don’t know Thunder Bay.”
If that’s not a call to action, then I don’t know what is.
My partner in crime, Jon Thompson, and I developed season 2 of the podcast together. We called it Return To Thunder Bay. Our effort was to spin back to the system(s) to check in and see how things were going post-Broken Trust.
It turns out things weren’t going all that well.
PRE-PRODUCTION BEGINS ON THE THUNDER BAY SERIES FOR CRAVE
We got the green light to enter into pre-production on the show late in 2020, early in 2021. That meant we had a load of work to figure out which direction to take our journalism and investigation to make the TV series.
We poured through every transcript, every interview, article, newscast, and yes, the reports - all of them. We prepped. We argued. We researched. We wrote. Pre-production is an exhaustive process in documentary filmmaking. The more decisions you make before you head into the field, the easier it is to be there. It doesn’t mean you can’t pivot once you start shooting, but preproduction gives you a path to follow before you inevitably find the story, or in our case before the story finds us.
We settled on focusing on the reinvestigations ordered inside the Broken Trust report. The report calls for reinvestigating 9 +1 sudden death investigations for their shockingly bad procedural errors and lapses in critical investigative police standards.
In September 2019, the Broken Trust Reinvestigation process began with the Office of the Chief Coroner and the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service preparing an independent, multi-disciplinary, multi-agency team. The team included the Thunder Bay Police Service.
From there, an Executive Governance Committee, an Investigative Resource Committee, and a Blended Investigative Team went to work. The process was to conclude in 2020, one year after it began.
Thunder Bay had been here before. Another high profile, high-stakes collision between the Indigenous community and the Thunder Bay Police Department and those adjacent to them.
The Seven Youth Coroners Inquest Report told us there was wildly unsatisfactory police work happening in the city. I wanted to find out how and why we were here again.
This set of circumstances set us on our production path.
FILMING BEGINS, AND IT’S CLEAR WE ARE FIGHTING A LOSING BATTLE IN THE CITY
We hit the ground running in Thunder Bay. We came into filming with a solid plan, rock-solid sources, and many willing families and community members wanting to talk with us.
While filming early in June 2021, we were invited to a press conference where many of the families whose loved ones deaths were included in the Broken Trust Reinvestigations stated that they had serious concerns about the state of the reinvestigations. Many families claimed they had not heard from the Executive Governance Committee (EGC) in months; some claimed they’d not heard from the EGC. This was troubling.
It’d been nearly three years since the start of the reinvestigations, and families and their lawyers had deep concerns about the process. One of the main concerns was the role the Thunder Bay Police Service itself had in the reinvestigations - Chief Sylvie Hauth was at the helm of the EGC, and officers from TBPS themselves were on the reinvestigation unit. Families claimed this was a clear conflict of interest - why was this process allowing the TBPS to investigate itself?
This was our first big clue during production that something really really wrong (other than the usual shit we were used to hearing) was happening inside the Thunder Bay Police Service. It made me pivot pretty hard in terms of our story and our planning, and I started considering if we had missed something in our research or were on the wrong track. These are difficult but necessary questions for a documentary crew to ask themselves.
We shot through the summer, focusing on a handful of death reinvestigations. We conducted our reinvestigations with private investigators. We worked with family members. We worked with sources in the city, with community members, with people inside institutions and at various levels of government. We started gathering evidence, leaks, and statements from those too scared to go on the record.
We were shaken to our core as we dug into the details surrounding the sudden deaths we were investigating for our series. Some of these sudden deaths were gruesome and brazen.
The more we dug into the sudden deaths for our series, the more apparent it was that we were fighting a losing battle.
The questions we were asking had no answers.
The demands the families of deceased Indigenous Peoples had of us were steep, and it became apparent we would struggle to meet their expectations. In instances where we received leaks and received materials to help us along the way, a common problem emerged - the source material (original police work and investigations) was so bad it could not be trusted.
The more I worked on the series, the less I knew and had more questions. When working on a documentary, creating the show is meant to help me learn something new; my job is to show that new thing to the world.
The opposite was happening, and I was losing my mind.
THE HRTO COMPLAINTS CHANGE EVERYTHING
At the end of October 2021, Georjann Morriseau filed a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario complaint alleging that she faced systemic discrimination by Chief Sylvie Hauth, Deputy Chief Ryan Hughes, police lawyer Holly Walbourne, board chair Kristen Oliver, board secretary John Hannam. The allegations in the complaint: she was discriminated against based on her race and ethnic origin as an Indigenous person.
The collapse of the Thunder Bay Police Service’s leadership and its board was on display for all to see. The cat was out of the bag, and this story became impossible to ignore.
Most shockingly, this was all happening publicly. And we were there.
One month later, human rights tribunal complaints against the Thunder Bay Police Service leadership piled up. Unprecedently, TBPS officers, both active and retired, came forward with their complaints.
Late in November 2021, we were tipped that the Thunder Bay Police Services Union had conducted an internal survey among members and that close to 80% of the workforce had lost faith in leadership there and did not feel supported. The results of this survey shocked us, and in my mind, a public safety emergency was on the horizon.
All the while, leadership in the city, Thunder Bay Police Service Board Chair Kirsten Oliver, Thunder Bay Police Service Board secretary John Hannam, Thunder Bay Police Service Chief of Police Sylvie Hauth, now former Mayor and Thunder Bay Police Service Board Member Bill Mauro, gas lit the city every chance they got.
We are united, working well, and far from "collapse."
-TBPSB Chair Kirsten Oliver, January 17, 2022
Imagine sending that press release.
Imagine sending that press release knowing what they knew was going on and what turmoil awaited them.
Imagine sending that press release and believing that you’d be in the clear by doing so.
Imagine ignoring the calls for accountability and transparency by believing issuing press releases would get you out of the trouble you’ve created for yourself as a police service board and a police service.
Did leadership here really have that level of confidence? If so, why? How?
This still doesn’t add up for me.
THE WALLS COME CRUMBLING DOWN IN JANUARY 2022
Whispers became a dull roar. We’d heard firsthand that the walls inside the TBPS were crumbling but were being told internal complaints from officers and a board member were overblown and being handled.
This was a dizzying time for me as a documentary filmmaker. At the time, I didn’t know the larger context of all of this, but it was clear the story we were working on may not be the only one we should be telling.
Human Rights Tribunal Complaints were piling up against the Thunder Bay Police Service and its board, and no one knew why.
A board member had publicly filed an HRTO complaint.
Thunder Bay Police Service Officers had filed HRTO complaints.
We were on the trail of the EGC’s final report into the Broken Trust Reinvestigation Report but were told we may never see the report.
We gave leadership inside the Thunder Bay Police Service every opportunity to come and say whatever they wanted, to make their claims about their work to change the service's culture.
We gave the Thunder Bay Police Service Board the same opportunity.
We gave the municipality and the mayor's office the same opportunity.
Nobody wanted to talk.
Their silence was deafening, and it said more than they knew.
MY EMPATHY AND COMPASSION FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE CITY OF THUNDER BAY
Death threats. That’s how my work is received.
Some people are happy the series was made and these stories have been told, but this work has a real cost.
According to this person, the cost to be paid is my life.
I expect this reaction. I’ve received death threats for my work before. It doesn’t feel great, but my work is steeped in the truths of this country. Part of the truth is that a small but ever-growing part of the population would rather not see me tell these stories, and when I do tell them, this is the reception I get. I chalk it up to it being just part of the job. I’m not mad about it; I’m not intimidated by it. It is what it is. Part of the job.
I have a lot of compassion and empathy for the people of Thunder Bay.
When I do interviews about this work, I always discuss the good things there. I talk about the grassroots efforts made in the name of change. I’m the first to champion the efforts of many inside the city; that’s part of the responsibility I bare having done this work.
I have a lot of empathy and compassion for the city. I have been saying this publicly since 2017, when I started working on the podcast. Whether people believe me or not is up to them.
Guns, gangs, and violence most definitely come from away in the city. The city has an overwhelming drug and gang problem. Yes, many people arrested and charged for guns, drugs and gang-related activity come from away (usually, people say Southern Ontario, but I’m not always certain that is the case).
The particular claims in the ever-growing number of HRTO filings made by officers themselves against the Thunder Bay Police Service and its leadership point to a mental health crisis and public safety issue inside Thunder Bay.
Officers that go off on leave for mental health distress are ridiculed and teased, and belittled. Leadership has coined the phrase “land of broken toys” for those “too weak to continue on the job” regarding mental health struggles.
PTSD is presumptive in policing, and those struggling with PTSD due to their work aren’t treated fairly, and their mental health struggles aren’t met with adequate support. We have it on the record from nearly a dozen officers that the supposed peer counselling service inside the Thunder Bay Police Service is probably the biggest perpetrator of bullying and teasing inside the force itself.
I am not here to judge policing or police officers. I am not interested in the defunding or abolishing conversation concerning Thunder Bay alone. Thunder Bay needs to figure out what it needs. That’s the work Thunder Bay needs to do for itself.
My beef is not with the rank-and-file police officers inside the Thunder Bay Police Service. I’m certain there are good people inside the service. I’m also sure there are assholes there as well. Everyone has a right to go to work and feel safe and supported by their employer. Through our work, it became clear that officers in Thunder Bay didn’t feel supported, and they didn’t feel safe.
My beef is with leadership inside the city and the Thunder Bay Police Service. I walked through the front doors of city hall and of police headquarters to ask questions that needed answers. I would not allow the Thunder Bay Police Service or its board to press release their way out of trouble.
I’d sit in a dark room and watch this documentary series with any single rank-and-file officer on the Thunder Bay Police Service without hesitation.
I’d sit in a dark room and watch this documentary series with anyone inside the walls of the municipality, NAN, DFC, Mattawa Education Centre, RMYC, etc.
I stand behind this work wholeheartedly.
I made this documentary series to stop indifference.
I made this documentary series to fight for Indigenous youth in Thunder Bay and beyond.
I made this documentary to push back against racism.
I made this documentary series to pick a fight with bullies.
I made this documentary series to pick a fight with people entrusted with the confidence of the public that they’d uphold the duties they were sworn to do.
I have a lot more to say. There is a lot more to say, and there is a lot more you should know.
I did my best to be fair and thorough. I tried to add important information and context to a tragic, nuanced, complex story.
I did what I could with this story through four episodes in a TV series. The story continues, though.
Every day, the story continues in Thunder Bay.
WATCH THUNDER BAY ON CRAVE TV.
Just a quick note to say, thank you for all your work on the Thunder Bay show. I know it was difficult work for you and all the people that offered their stories. As a relatively new resident of the city, I am consistently disappointed and disgusted by the activities of those with power. It’s also hard to watch those that turn their heads because they don’t want to see. The podcast and show forces us all to see. You have done good work that supports ongoing efforts in the city to make change. I thank you for it.
Right now Canada is doing a big psychiatric medicine push, saying there is a big mental health crisis. I know lots of nish are going to get swept up in that. They will treat with forced medicine instead of getting people off drugs/ eating right. People are going to be injected with shit that sterilizes, kills sex function, fucks up the heart, etc. All acceptable side effects to the health scientists in the national social health system. Those health workers will act without conscience. Canada is building a monster.