Thunder Bay Owes Georjann Morriseau an Apology

Today, Sylvie Hauth the former Police Chief of Thunder Bay, has been charged with obstruction of justice, obstruction of a public official, and breach of trust by a public officer.

Here's a fun bit of this news - she announced her retirement the same day that the civilian oversight agency announced that they would hold hearings about her behaviour. Her retirement meant that those hearings never happened. A lesson learned (which has been blatantly obvious for a long time) is that if you are implementing police reform - ensure that your oversight agency had mandate over former police officers who committed their violations while they were police officers. That also means that these oversight agencies need to be able to impose penalties beyond even the harshest punishment a police officer can possibly imagine - losing the badge. Literally worse than capital punishment! /s Anywho - I believe these charges are related to Hauth's campaign to discredit Georgjann Morriseau, the Thunder Bay Police Services Board Chair at the time. And this was possibly related to recent reports of Thunder Bay Police being deeply and intensely racist and completely indifferent to the killings of multiple Indigenous youth. This period of time put Thunder Bay up as the number one contender against Winnipeg for being Canada's Most Racist City.

So hooray I guess for getting to actual charges? Anyways, the reason I'm mentioning this is that - yes there has been coverage of the arrest of and charges being laid against a former police chief. But AFAICT, there has been zero information about the victim. No one has yet to report how Georjann Morriseau feels about this, nor has anyone offered up any apology to her. In fact, none of the stories I've seen thus far even mention what the charges are about or names Morriseau at all.

Anyways, if you're looking into information as to what a police chief possibly could have done to warrant getting criminal charges - you'll have to go back to when the civilian oversight board announced hearings. And again, those hearings never took place because Sylvie Hauth resigned.

UPDATE: I was mistaken about no one discussing the actual things that Sylvie Hauth is alleged to have done. There is ONE news story from April 12th that covers it - and weirdly, that fact makes the news sites look even worse. The one story that covered it was the Canadian Press wire service.