Watching the Watchmen: A Historical Look at the Legacy of the Thunder Bay Police

By Jacob Richard

On December 2, 1920, The Globe reported in its ‘News of the Day’ that Joseph Buchie, an “Indian convict” in the Port Arthur Jail, had cleverly “locked his warder in his cell, released two others, cooked a breakfast and walked out.”[1] Buchie must have felt elated when he walked free of the prison doors; the full breakfast and two companions were a welcome bonus. Through this simple and life-changing act of resistance, Buchie successfully challenged the authority of Canada’s carceral state. But the question remains: if the watchmen aren’t watching the prisoners, who’s watching the watchmen?

“Downtown Fort William, ca. 1890s-1900s.” Photo from the Thunder Bay City Clerk’s Photograph Collection. Location: TBA P012, Accession 1991-01-170. (Public Domain)

‘Nobody’ is the answer you would get from anyone living in Thunder Bay. A little over two months ago, Indigenous leaders from Thunder Bay reiterated their 2022 call to disband the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS). Their justification? The countless years of systematic racism, ineptitude, and corruption that have scandalized the TBPS and cast doubt on its ability ‘to serve and protect.’

The Contemporary Problems

In 2018, the Tribunals Ontario TBPS Board Final Report painted a very grim picture: “The issues identified with Thunder Bay policing … are not the result of behaviours by individual racists, … 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 … organizations and agencies mandated to oversee them.”

Entirely disbanding the TBPS may be a bold goal, but with every attempt to reform the TBPS, racism remains prevalent.

Since at least 2015, independent inquests, reviews, and investigations of the TBPS have all repeatedly demonstrated that something is painfully wrong with the state of Thunder Bay’s policing culture. Ryan McMahon’s 2023 Documentary Thunder Bay, for example, gave viewers a harrowing account of ongoing struggles between the TBPS and Thunder Bay’s Indigenous community. Despite Ryan’s call for change, the Indigenous death toll continues to climb, and help is nowhere to be found.

Officially, the “clear and indisputable pattern of violence and systemic racism against Indigenous people” of the TBPS stems from the “failure to act on these issues in the face of overwhelming documentary and media exposure.” As founded as these assertions are, you don’t have to look hard to find that contemporary issues regarding the TBPS have a much longer history and legacy.

The Longer Legacy

Two years ago, Brandon Cordeiro demonstrated how Thunder Bay “is a city tied to its colonial past and … still exudes the darkest realities of settler-indigenous relations in Canada.” The police service as it exists today was created in 1970, along with the city of Thunder Bay, after the merger of the Port Arthur and Fort William municipalities. The TBPS’s legacy, just like the city’s, is inherited from these previous iterations. Cordeiro reminds us that the TBPS continues to hold undue “influence and agency over Indigenous peoples’ everyday lives.”

While it is true that the TBPS is “part of Canada’s colonial history,” Cordeiro focused on contemporary inequalities in a mostly post-COVID Thunder Bay. Criticism of the TBPS and Thunder Bay’s jails goes back much further than the 1970s. In 1911, J. J. Carrick, an MP from Port Arthur, publicly criticized the province for “the deplorable condition of the Port Arthur jail and the inadequacy of the Court House.”[2] Later that year The Globe also reported that “the district jail and Court House here are a blot upon the sense of decency … The government has for years refused to remedy these conditions though many times urged to do so.”[3]

By the 1940s, investigations continued to comment on how the “deplorable conditions are a monumental disgrace … there are beds in the washroom, beds in the laundry, beds in the hallway.”[4] While the jail was holding double its capacity, harbouring an awful stench, and starving its population with insufficient nourishment, the investigators pointed the finger directly at the police. Ultimately, the incarcerated wouldn’t be suffering “if ‘certain people had looked after their jobs.’”

“Finlanders on their farm west of Port Arthur, Ontario.” Photo from Library and Archives Canada Image Collection. Item Number 3367688, Accession 1970-236 NPC. (Public Domain)

The 1911 condemnations stemmed from a large uptick in incarceration around the mid-1900s when the jail was deemed “too small even for the demands on them through ordinary drunks.”[5] Xenophobia defined Port Arthur’s policing even back then, “chiefly because of the influx of foreign labourers” who “are so quick to use their knives and other weapons when quarrelling.” A quick glance at the Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867-1976 confirms this trend in foreign incarceration. Almost twice as many designated foreigners (largely Finnish and Ukrainian) were sentenced to death by the Ontario Court of Justice in Port Arthur than designated Anglo/Franco-Canadians.

In 1908, the Doukhobors were also characterized as “giving much trouble.”[6] The Doukhobors were a persecuted ethnoreligious group from Russia and had been emigrating to Canada since 1899 with the help of federal aid. Due to their religious beliefs, they refused “to eat anything on the jail bill of fair … and demand fruits, peanuts, apples and prunes.” Rather than acquiesce, Port Arthur Jail authorities remained steadfast. They “decline[d] to break the rules,” which meant that “nothing can result other than the death of the Doukhobors by starvation.” This potentiality was justified through the Doukhobors’ refusal to “clothe themselves, or so much as clean out their own cells.”

“The Doukhobor Pilgrims Carrying their Helpless.” Photo by Thomas V. Simpson, from the British Library (Canadian Copyright Collection/Picturing Canada). Accession HS85/10/13520. (Public Domain)

The Tribunals Ontario TBPS Board Final Report gives us our last example. Pierre Hunter, an Anishinaabe man from Lac Seul, died in 1916 as a direct result of Thunder Bay’s systematic racism. Despite Hunter’s treaty rights allowing him to hunt and fish freely, he was charged with illegally possessing moose meat and jailed in Port Arthur for thirty days. After being released, “Without money to travel 200 miles back to Lac Seul, he attempted to walk home. After four weeks of travel, Hunter died, too afraid to kill game along the way.” In the aftermath, “Game Warden George Fanning applauded the event as doing ‘the Indians around here considerable good.’”

Thunder Bay’s criminal justice system has never turned a blind eye to the plight of the incarcerated. Historically and contemporarily, the TBPS has exacerbated their suffering and viewed their deaths as the preferred outcome.

Conclusion

My point, in referring to these past instances of cruelty, xenophobia, and death, is that the longer legacy of the TBPS is tainted. Contemporary instances of racism are vile, but the fight to challenge Thunder Bay’s carceral state did not begin in 2022. The conditions of those jailed in the Thunder Bay region have always been detestable, and these conditions have always disproportionately affected minority groups.

Steps are being made, but it is important to remember the TBPS’s longer legacy of racism when calling to disband it. Far from contemporary politics, disbanding the TBPS means actively decolonizing Thunder Bay and challenging its historical oppression of the ‘other.’ Canadian policing has always been problematic, and Thunder Bay’s longstanding issues highlight the need to revisit these concerns in earnest. Rather than engage in the endless reform and reiteration of colonial policing structures, maybe, just like Joseph Buchie, it’s time to lock our warders away.

Jacob Richard is a History Ph.D. student at Queen’s University. A settler historian and Acadian from Thunder Bay, he researches nineteenth-century North America with a focus on Euro-Indigenous relations.

Suggested Reading

Boylan, Richard T. “Should cities disband their police departments?” Journal of Urban Economics 130 (July 2022): Article 103460.

King, William R. “Organizational Failure and the Disbanding of Local Police Agencies.” Crime & Delinquency 60, no. 5 (2014): 667-692.

Morrison, Jean. Labour Pains: Thunder Bay’s Working Class in the Wheat Boom Era. Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, 2009.

Sinclair, Murray. “Thunder Bay Police Services Board Investigation – Final Report.” Falconers LLP. Tribunals Ontario, November 1, 2018. https://www.falconers.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Thunder-Bay-Police-Services-Board-Investigation-Final-Report-December-14-2018.pdf.

Notes

[1] “Table of Contents 1 — no Title.” The Globe (1844-1936), December 2, 1920.

[2] “NORTHERN ONTARIO BADLY NEGLECTED: Charge Made by Mr. J. J. Carrick in Addressing House.” The Globe (1844-1936), March 2, 1911.

[3] “PORT ARTHUR JAIL IS A DISGRACE: GRAND JURY USES STRONG LANGUAGE IN DESCRIBING CONDITIONS.” The Globe (1844-1936), November 18, 1911.

[4] “Page 8.” Toronto Daily Star (1900-1971), October 14, 1947.

[5] “WANT LARGER JAILS: No Room for ‘Drunks’ at Kenora and Port Arthur.” The Globe (1844-1936), July 9, 1906.

[6] “REFUSE JAIL FOOD: Doukhobors are Giving Much Trouble at Port Arthur.” The Globe (1844-1936), April 13, 1908.