Thunder Bay - Post Mortem

Part One of a new two-part series drops today on Canadaland.

Thunder Bay - Post Mortem is a new two-part limited series on Canadaland, available everywhere you get your podcasts.

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After the Thunder Bay docuseries dropped on CRAVE TV this past February, I received a lot of emails. It was overwhelming.

I got emails from families that told me about their loved ones having died in the city, and no one giving a shit.

I got violent threats from anonymous folks who let me know payback would be swift and that if I ever showed my face in the city again, there’d be trouble. I took these with a grain of salt but found it troubling that my favourite lunch spots and coffee shops were mentioned as places I frequented in several emails so they’d “know where to find me.”

I got emails from former cops letting me know things were far worse in that police service than we could ever portray.

And I got tips, leaks, and some materials I had no business handling. At this point, the work on the TV series had ended. I was unemployed and not formally working on the story anymore. But once you’ve told this story, it’s hard to turn your back on it.

And if you’re one of those rare people who don’t turn your back on this story, at each turn of the story, just as you think you know the story, the story takes a turn.

The tip I received that got Thunder Bay - Post Mortem started was from the Chair of the Ontario Coroners Association. They expressed their concern about coroner services in Northwestern Ontario. Maybe more importantly, the tip alerted me that coroners had concerns that reached far outside the city of Thunder Bay and deep inside the system.

When reading this tip, my stomach dropped. I felt like I had done something wrong. I felt like I had missed a whole chapter of this story. I can’t describe the panic I felt that night; it was hard to sleep.

Coroners investigate deaths that appear to be from unnatural causes or natural deaths that occur suddenly or unexpectedly.

It has been well established through the Seven Youth Coroners Inquest, the Broken Trust Report, the Murray Sinclair Report, and the leaks we have received due to our reporting processes that the Thunder Bay Police Service is awful at sudden death investigations.

We know about these failures.

We understand these failures.

These failures have devastated us all.

No one wanted to talk to us when we started telling this story. Today, we have whistleblowers, insiders, community members, youth, cops and lawyers pointing us in new directions.

Thunder Bay’s defence of itself has always been, “This kind of stuff happens everywhere; it’s not just here.” It’s time to test that theory.

We’ve peeled back the layers of this story carefully. What we’ve found is shocking.

Part one of Thunder Bay - Post Mortem is out now wherever you get your podcasts.

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