The tourism board in Thunder Bay, Ont. probably won鈥檛 like this week鈥檚 W5 episode.
Maybe they should, if it helps to undo a despicable and embarrassing reputation: Thunder Bay is Canada鈥檚 murder capital.
There are more murders per capita in the city than anywhere else in the nation.
What makes it worse is that many Thunder Bay murders have an undeniable stink of racism. Racism that targets Indigenous people. Racism that many believe is a barrier to solving a slew of missing persons cases that end up in undeterminable deaths.
This week鈥檚 W5 is a first-hand story told by Anishinaabe podcaster . Ryan loves Thunder Bay. It鈥檚 where he spent much of his youth, playing hockey and visiting friends and family.
But Ryan admits that he also fears Thunder Bay. It鈥檚 a city in which young Indigenous people have repeatedly turned up dead in local waterways. Ryan suspects that the murder rate in Thunder Bay is actually higher than reported because at least some of those bodies were murder victims.
Back in 2018, Ryan produced a about it. He ended up uncovering more questions than answers. That鈥檚 why he produced a to look more closely at what happened in several specific cases that are wrapped in and even fuelled by racism.
A Crave publicity person sent me a screener, so I could watch episode one. She was hoping that we might do a story on Ryan and his series. But when I saw episode one I thought, wow the best way to share Ryan鈥檚 story鈥s to share Ryan鈥檚 story.
So, this week, W5 viewers will see Ryan鈥檚 documentary on what happened to a young and talented hockey player named Jordan Wabasse. And he dissects the fascinating murder trial of a young white man named Brayden Bushby, who was accused of murdering an Indigenous woman Barbara Kentner in the most heinous way: by throwing a steel trailer hitch at her from a moving vehicle.
