It’s Valentine’s Day in Downtown Vancouver’s Eastside and for the 18th consecutive year, there’ll be a march for the women who’ve lost their lives or gone missing on its impoverished streets. Hundreds of sympathetic, solemn-faced people have assembled outside the Carnegie Centre in the closed-off intersection of Main and Hastings streets. They wait patiently for the families of the missing and murdered, who are inside giving voice to their grief.
In a Carnegie Centre meeting room, the walls are lined with paper hearts. A woman fans burning sage and sweetgrass with an eagle feather and the air is full of their scents. Meanwhile, a group of Aboriginal men bang drums appreciatively as family members of missing women step toward a microphone. Some dissolve into tears as they recall their sisters, mothers and daughters. Others rail about police cover-ups and conspiracies.
One of the speakers is Ernie Crey. A squarely built man with a wide, gentle face, he is welcomed with the kind of encouraging applause given to an old friend. “This is a day I mark on my calendar,” says the 59-year-old fisheries and child-welfare advisor for the Sto:lo Tribal Council, whose ancestral lands are located in the Fraser Valley. “I’ve come down here to celebrate the memory of my sister Dawn.”
Dawn Crey’s DNA was found on the suburban pig farm of Robert William Pickton, but the Crey family has been told there isn’t enough evidence to add her case to the 26 counts of murder that Pickton was charged with. (In December 2007, he was convicted of second-degree murder on six of them.) But at the time of his sentence, 39 other cases of missing women were still unsolved. To the families of those women, Pickton’s conviction, after a five-year investigation and a year-long trial that reportedly cost more than $100 million, brings little comfort. They have good reason to fear that their pleas will be brushed aside and ignored forever.
Ernie becomes forceful as he pushes for a more thorough investigation into the whereabouts of the missing women who are still unaccounted for. “It’s not acceptable,” he says, to applause. “When there’s an unjust situation, I just don’t lie down. I’m not anybody’s doormat.”
While Pickton may have entered our national consciousness as a monstrous villain, in reality he wasn’t so much a diabolical mastermind as an opportunist. Though he won’t be eligible for parole until 2027, Pickton’s incarceration hasn’t changed the conditions that allowed him such easy access to vulnerable women in the first place.
There isn’t any official figure on female sex workers on the neighbourhood’s streets, but Kate Gibson, the executive director of the area’s Women’s Information and Safe Haven (WISH) Drop-in Centre Society, places the number between 1,500 and 2,000. On average, these women enter the trade at 14 and have a life expectancy of 40. Even though Pickton’s trial exposed the dire situation of Vancouver’s sex workers, women are “still homeless, they still live in abject poverty, they’re still traumatized, they’re discriminated against,” says Gibson. She waves a stack of “bad-date reports” from sex workers who’ve been mistreated recently, and adds, “There are still guys like that out there.”
