The Bottomless Heartbreak of the Murder of Five People in Carman, Manitoba
We can't avert our eyes from the truth
Just recently. the horrific news broke that a five people were murdered in Carman, Manitoba, a small town of about 3,000 people.
The heartbreak and sorrow is terrible.
Three children were killed, and so was their mother: according to news reports, “30-year-old Amanda Clearwater and her three children: six-year-old Bethany, four-year-old Jayven, and two-and-a-half-month-old Isabella.” A 17-year-old niece, Myah-Lee Gratton, was also murdered.
Ryan Manoakeesick, a 29-year-old man has been arrested and charged with first degree murder.
It’s been noted that he has already been arrested on other charges - impaired driving causing bodily harm, and an incident where he smashed an electronic display while high on meth. He was warned to get mental health and addictions treatment by courts, and said he was “seeking” mental health treatment.
I spent five years as a member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. That meant, on a personal basis, that I was approached by people in need of help, and we heard regularly from people pleading for help who were ignored, because there was no help.
To say it is horrifying is an understatement. People who are crying out for help are routinely ignored, and quite frankly have been for decades.
Child and family services, shelter, income, justice, mental health and addictions, and the people who are hurt are the people who are “marginalized” which is to say, people who are considered a burden by government, rather than a responsibility, and the poorest, at highest risk are routinely women, children, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities.
I am not going to be partisan or assign blame. I just want to lay out the facts, and explain what is happening, and what has happened in Manitoba, and when the decisions were made.
The one thing I learned was that the truth was almost always much worse than what you heard initially.
Provincial Child and Family Services (CFS) Authorities Were Warned that the Accused was Dangerous
This heartbreaking story emerged after the murder in Carman:
… "It could have been all avoided – and that's what gets me. No one listened. No one listened," Hastings said.
Hastings said Manoakeesick had been struggling with mental health issues resulting in violent episodes.
“He was not himself. He was odd. He was short-tempered, and he was talking about aliens and stars – just odd things," she said.
On more than one occasion, Hastings said police were called to the home due to Manoakeesick's episodes.
Though she relayed her fears to CFS throughout the ten months her daughter was staying with the couple, Hastings said she felt her concerns fell on deaf ears.
"You didn't listen to me now, and my baby is dead," she said.
The response from the current Minister of Families was to say:
“There is a robust licensing regime in Manitoba for foster homes or for placements of children. Once the investigation and, of course, reviews will come out, certainly our government is more than prepared to look at whether or not those reviews say that there needs to be even more stringent criteria or requirements for foster care placements."
The claim of a “robust licensing regime” is not accurate.
There is no question that children were being placed by CFS with someone with a criminal record, and the allegation that the biological mother repeatedly warned CFS workers, and that police were present because of disturbances.
It is a systemic problem, as we know because in December 2019, Manitoba’s Auditor General prepared a report on Manitoba’s Foster Homes, which made 112 recommendations.
The majority of management and staff interviewed said there is a chronic shortage of suitable foster homes. Some said this was resulting in agencies making some placement decisions out of desperation rather than best fit.
… In the 40 foster home files examined, we found that security checks were not always obtained as required by the Regulation. A total of 84 adults lived in these homes at the time of licensing. We found:
• No criminal record check for 32 adults living in the home (38%).
• No child abuse registry check for 13 adults living in the home (15%). • No prior contact check for 12 adults living in the home (14%).SECURITY CHECKS NOT DONE AS REQUIRED
In 45 files (60%) security checks (criminal record check, child abuse registry check, and prior contact check) were not done on foster parents and other adults living in the home, as required. Exceptions were:
• Checks not being redone at the frequency set in agency expectations.
• Checks not being done at all for other adults living in the home.
• Criminal risk assessments being done rather than criminal record checks.There was no direction in the Regulation or Department policy on how frequently checks should be re-done and frequency varied by agency. Each agency had their own differing expectations with some agencies redoing all checks bi-annually and another agency never redoing certain checks.
One of the Auditor General’s recommendations was that “in cases where CFS Authorities are involved in the decision to remove a child from a foster home, that the appeals be heard by the Department (rather than the CFS Authority).”
The National Crime Has Never Stopped - CFS as the “New Residential Schools”
Child and Family Services has been called the “New Residential Schools” - so-called Indian Residential Schools were schools that First Nations children were required to attend.
In 1907, and again in 1922, Dr. Peter Bryce, Canada’s first medical officer, wrote reports about the appalling death rates at these schools from infectious diseases like Tuberculosis. Children were expected to “earn their keep” by working growing vegetables, and so were engaged in forced labour, poorly dressed. Several thousand children died, in part because of a bureaucratic refusal to introduce basic public health measures which were effective, and being funded, elsewhere across Canada.
All of this happened at the Brandon Residential School - as I detailed here. This school was not isolated in deep wilderness - the Methodist-run Residential school was in Brandon - Manitoba’s second-largest city. The Superintendent for the Methodist Mission for all of Western Canada was in the same town. There were complaints for years about children without enough clothing working fields in April and May, when temperatures can regularly hover around freezing.
In the 1950s, the Federal government changed its policy and started to phase out residential schools, and legally transferred responsibility for children - and child and family services - to provincial governments.
This was a very significant shift. In Canada, Indigenous people with “treaty rights” are the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, including providing funding for education and health care.
However, this meant that children - including First Nations children - now fell under the jurisdiction of provincial governments.
The 60s Scoop
Instead of taking children and sending them to Residential Schools, provincial governments took children and adopted them out across North America and even around the world.
The process began in 1951, when changes to the Indian Act gave the provincial government authority over Indigenous child welfare. By the mid-1960s, the number of Indigenous children in the child welfare system in some provinces was over 50 times more than it had been in the beginning of the 1950s… Child Welfare workers did not have to seek the consent of Indigenous communities when taking these children from their families until 1980.
The numbers were in the thousands - keeping in mind that Canada’s Indigenous population has grown considerably in the last 50 years.
The reason for this is that there are many people who were considered “non-status” Indigenous, including Métis.
In Manitoba, First Nations communities were often excluded from resource projects on their own territory - no natural resource sharing, and Hydro-electric dams were built, flooding out and destroying communities without compensation.
Manitoba has long had terrible poverty - the deepest poverty in Canada - though it is not the poorest province. In 1992, social assistance rates were rolled back to 1986 levels, and frozen there, where except for a $25/month increase, they remain today, in 2024.
“Child apprehensions” have continued for decades. A shortage of foster spaces meant that in the 1990s, the Manitoba Government started putting up wards of CFS in downtown hotels. The number of children in the custody of CFS in Manitoba started steadily rising in 1997.
In March 2006, a five-year old girl, Phoenix Sinclair, was found. Her parents had tortured and killed her before disposing of her body in a landfill. They were still collecting a children’s allowance, and no CFS worker had checked on her.
The numbers are absolutely chilling.
Here are some details from a Winnipeg Free Press story from December, 2008. In the 20 months between March 2006 and December 21, 2008, there were 16 deaths of children in the custody of CFS.
“Deaths of children in care since Phoenix Sinclair was found in March 2006:
16 total
5 accidental
6 suicides
2 homicides
2 undetermined
1 co-sleeping”
The numbers were shocking then, and they got much worse.
The Inquiry into Phoenix Sinclair’s death was delayed when the union representing CFS workers intervened to block it. It took until 2011 to start, and was presented in 2014.
One of its major conclusions that most children were taken by CFS, not because of “abuse” - active harm - but because of neglect, often because of poverty.
In the meantime, the Manitoba government response was, arguably, to become “hyper vigilant” and the number of children taken into custody started to increase.
2006 – 6,629 children
2007 – 7,241 children
2008 – 7,837 children
According to EvidenceNetwork.ca”
A 2012 study in the medical journal, The Lancet observed that Manitoba’s rate of kids in care is among the highest in the world.
The Lancet study relies heavily on data from Manitoba. Some of these figures have since been updated, but not improved:
In 2014, Manitoba Family Services reported more than 10,000 children in care.
Numbers from Manitoba Family Services were used to calculate that on March 31, 2011, over 3 percent of children aged 0–17 years were in care.2
When compared to other countries, the figures become even more startling:
The report of the Hughes inquiry into Phoenix Sinclair’s death found that most First Nations and Aboriginal kids are apprehended for "neglect, not abuse” due to parents’ poverty & poor housing.
The soaring budgets for children in care was not going to parents: it only flowed after the children were seized.
Manitoba’s numbers also show disproportionate representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care. Indigenous children make up about 26 percent of the provincial child population, yet in 2014, Manitoba Family Services reported that nearly 90 percent of 10,000 kids in care were either First Nation, Metis or Inuit. And a new report from MCHP demonstrates that over one out of every five First Nations children in Manitoba spends some time in care before their 15th birthday.
“Birth Alerts” are a euphemism for taking a newborn baby from its mother. At one point, on average, the province of Manitoba was seizing an Indigenous newborn baby a day, every day, for years on end.
While there is no doubt that both foster parents and social workers who are caring and dedicated, the system itself continued to have massive problems that got worse.
One of the most common reasons for calls to Winnipeg Police is that a child in the custody of CFS has gone missing – hundreds of calls a month. We know that every year, hundreds of youth in Manitoba are sexually exploited, and many are wards of the CFS system.
Some examples:
In 2015, a lack of foster spaces and a promise to stop putting children in hotels led to them being held in jail instead. “Manitoba's family services minister was warned a while ago that children in care were being kept in jail longer than necessary because of a shortage of appropriate foster care spots.”
When these children “age out of care” when they turn 18, they would be immediately cut off from all benefits, and many become homeless. According to a recent “street census” of homeless people in Winnipeg, over 50% had been in child and family services. Many fail to complete Grade 12.
These are numbers from 2022: Of every 1000 Indigenous children in Manitoba, 141 are in “out-of-home care”. That’s 14 percent. 3 in 20.
People in CFS are also more likely to be targeted for criminal exploitation by sex traffickers, as well as to be recruited in criminal gangs. Manitoba has twice the incarceration rate of Canada as a whole, and Indigenous inmates are massively overrepresented, and many were in CFS. There is a CFS-to-prison pipeline in Manitoba.
To put the number of Indigenous Children in CFS in Manitoba in perspective.
The 60s scoop of Indigenous children “adopted out” between the years of 1960 and 1990 was 20,000 - for all of Canada, over a period of 30 years.
1948 – There were 72 residential schools with 9,368 students.
1979 – There were 12 residential schools remaining with an enrollment of 1,189 students”
In Manitoba Alone, there were over 11,000 children in CFS in a single year - ten years ago. More than the entire enrolment of Canada’s residential schools in some years. Half the entire 60s scoop.
As mentioned above, the province of Manitoba had kept its social assistance rates at 1986 levels throughout all of this time, and First Nations especially were shut out of the economy - even from natural resource revenues (from oil, gas, mining etc.). In Canada, those royalties and revenues are collected by provinces, but they didn’t share it with First Nations, even when it was on their territory.
While the expense of the CFS system kept growing, it’s important to point out that the funds were not always making it to children: quite the contrary.
The increased fees were not going to foster parents, whose fees were frozen in 2011.
And in addition, the Manitoba government started clawing back Federal allowances from children on a dollar for dollar basis.
Brief context: in Canada, the federal government has a child benefit, and for First Nations it is called the “Children’s Special Allowance.” It has increased, and it especially increased after 2015, when the Federal Government increased it and made it progressive - over $500 a month.
The Manitoba Government started taking all of it - and if a CFS agency tried to pass it on to the children or foster family, it would be clawed back at a rate of 100%.
According to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs:
“starting in 2005, Manitoba’s government redirected the federal money to flow to the province’s general revenues first, arguing that because Manitoba was the jurisdiction paying for the maintenance of children in care, the money was owed to them. The province argues that it then redirects equivalent funding to foster-care organizations. But this still incentivizes the removal of First Nation children from Nations. The more children in foster care, the more money the province gets from Ottawa.”
Over the years, the amount of money seized from children in care between 2006 and 2019 grew to an estimated $338-million. Some individual children lost an estimated $90,000.
In 2019, the Manitoba Government stopped seizing the funds, and moved to a new funding model, “block funding” which was supposed to prevent the “incentivizing” of child seizures. As it stood, prior to that, CFS agencies only got funded when children were seized.
However, the $338-million that had been taken from First Nations children seized by the province was not returned to them. Instead, the government decided to keep it, and in the 2020 omnibus budget bill, they not only kept the money, they made it against the law to sue them for it.
Not only did this cancel possible future court cases, it cancelled ones that had already been filed. It also shielded and specifically protected the politicians and bureaucrats who had been responsible for deciding to take seize the children’s federal allowances.
Incredibly, the government of Manitoba does have the power to outlaw certain types of lawsuits against itself. However, not that time: the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) brought a court case seeking the funds and on Wednesday, May 18 2022, the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench ruled that between 2006 and 2019, the Manitoba Government had violated the constitutional rights of First Nations children who had been taken from their families.
As it stands, there has been no resolution. The AMC is suing the Government of Manitoba for $1-billion.
Multisystems failure
I say all of this because the horror and tragedy of the murders in Carman keep happening.
A 2021 report by the Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth, following up on progress on recommendations since the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry, 19 children under age of five had died of maltreatment since Phoenix Sinclair.
“In Hughes’ inquiry report from 2014, he laid out 62 recommendations to better protect Manitoba children after the death of five-year-old Phoenix in June 2005. Despite his recommendations for sweeping changes and repeated acknowledgements by the provincial government in years since that improvements are underway, the Advocate’s latest investigation found that progress has been slow.
According to the Advocate’s analysis, 55 per cent of Hughes’ recommendations have been completed so far, seven years after the release of his report. At the current rate of progress, it will be 2028 before all of the recommendations are completed.”
Only 8% (4/51) of recommendations for service improvements have been implemented fully, and the provincial government has demonstrated substantive actions towards implementation in less than half (43%) of recommendations.”
If we want to start talking about how we never want to see something like Carman happen again, we need to understand the scope and breadth of the problem.
In this case, the suspect Ryan Manoakeesick was also in CFS. He was taken away from his family when he was eight. He was from Garden Hill, which is part of a group of isolated, fly-in First Nations in Northern Manitoba.
He was arrested for committing a crime - he vandalized a display at Tim Horton’s while high on meth, and was ordered to get mental health and addictions help.
The thing is, Manitoba doesn’t have much of an addictions or mental health care system. Manitoba has serious shortfalls in the number of psychologists compared to the rest of Canada, and the same is true for addictions supports.
Again, Manitoba’s Auditor General reported that “Manitoba lacks capacity for addictions treatment,”
The addictions unit at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre is the only medical detoxification facility in Manitoba, the report notes. It only has 11 beds.
The report also found long waits for non-medical addictions treatment in Winnipeg and Brandon, while no non-medical treatment at all was available in Thompson from March to November 2022.
At the same time, the capacity at RAAM clinics, which offer rapid access to addictions treatment, was insufficient. Over a 12-month period, six Manitoba RAAM clinics offered services to 1,342 people but had to turn another 1,218 away.
The delivery of addictions treatment is decentralized, records are still largely paper-based and data collection is poor, the report says.
There were 400 confirmed substance-related deaths in Manitoba in 2021, compared to 335 and 151 in the previous two years, it says.
Manitoba also has no legislated standards for addictions treatment centres, which means that anyone can open and run a treatment centre. Manitoba has more legislation protecting the health and safety of farm animals than it does human beings with addiction.
When the Federal Government brought in a new health funding accord for mental health care and homecare, the Manitoba Government delayed in signing it, then further delayed in spending it.
So, where can someone go if they are supposed to get mental health care or addictions treatment in Manitoba, if they are going to turn their life around?
And I have to emphasize for a moment, that we cannot generalize about associating mental health and crime. Mental illness is not a “root cause” of crime: we know this because the sad evidence is that people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. Many crimes, including horrific ones, can be committed by people who are sober and have no mental illness.
“Intimate Partner Violence” one police-reported incident every 20 minutes
Manitoba is a province with terrible levels of domestic violence. Two of the most common calls for police in Winnipeg, the capital city, are “intimate partner violence” and missing persons because a child in the custody of CFS has fled their home.
This CBC story discussed the issue:
According to one study, intimate partner violence claims a woman's life every six days. And 2022 Statistics Canada data shows Manitoba has the second-highest rate of intimate partner violence among Canadian provinces, just behind Saskatchewan.
The Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth released a report that found
“that over a period of just one month in Manitoba, there were 1,943 police-reported cases of IPV, which translates to one police-reported incident every 20 minutes.
Of those incidents, 342 were witnessed by at least one child or youth under the age of 18 years old. This means every two hours a child in Manitoba witnesses a police-reported incident of intimate partner violence.”
Despite these levels, Manitoba has no emergency shelters for women. Until last year (2023), provincial funding for women’s shelters had been frozen for 15 years. That included during the pandemic, when there was a noted increase in domestic violence, but no increased support for shelters from the province.
In Manitoba, it’s common to blame crime on homelessness, mental health and addictions. What is driving the misery and desperation are the province’s decades of policies of forced poverty and the idea that governments are entitled to tear apart Indigenous families “for their own good.”
Most Manitobans and most Canadians do not know this is happening, and that a huge hurdle to justice. It is not just intergenerational trauma from Residential Schools: the trauma is fresh, and happening right now and it is an open wound that is not even talked about, much less addressed.
The first step in addressing a problem is admitting you have one. Manitoba has been in denial for decades.
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Powerful article showing how deep these issues go. A must read!
Great article with some insight into our CFS and mental health system. In my 13 years of practice I’ve seen some small changes in the CFS system but there’s a ways to go. For example the birth alert system I believe no longer exists. While I know in most cases it would lead to an apprehension, some workers used the alert system to get in contact with a mother who had avoided contact with the worker, in order to develop a safety plan for their newborn.
Our mental health system needs so much more, as many of us workers are doing the best that we can, but most of which are working on crisis and acute care vs long term treatment. The waitlists are long, and there’s not enough of us to go around.