by SIMON VAN VLIET
MONTREAL—On the night of February 16, 2012, Josiane Millette called 911 because she feared her boyfriend, Jean-François Nadreau, was going to commit suicide. When five officers from the Montreal police showed up in the door, Nadreau panicked, picked up a machete and moved towards the officers shouting “Go away!” He was shot in the chest and died on the spot.
“There shouldn’t be anymore lives destroyed,” Millette wrote in a statement issued on October 19, 2012, as part of the Justice for Victims of Police Killings Coalition campaign to end police violence and impunity. “No one should be victim of such a tragedy. No one deserves this.”
Several incidents in Quebec, including severe injuries during the student protests earlier this year, have raised public awareness of the abusive use of force by police. In a press conference on November 13, 2012, civil society groups asked for a public independent inquiry into police operations during the student strike, with a larger mandate of creating a transparent and impartial civil surveillance system over police work.
Though police brutality was particularly obvious during the recent social turmoil in Quebec, police violence and impunity have existed for decades throughout the country. In 2012, police-related incidents leading to serious injuries or deaths were reported from Nova Scotia to British Columbia.
“This doesn’t happen to ‘criminals,’” Julie Matson told The Dominion at this year’s annual October 22 commemorative vigil for victims of police killings in Montreal. “It happens to regular people.”
Her father, Ben Matson, died of restraint-associated cardiac arrest in custody of Vancouver police in 2002. Despite evidence of severe beating, the investigation resulted in no criminal charges for the officers involved and the Coroner’s Office inquest concluded that the death had been accidental. The case was closed, without closure for Matson’s family.
Mainstream media generally look at these events as isolated incidents. The Justice for Victims of Police Killings Coalition have, however, documented at least 60 police-related deaths since 1987 in Montreal alone. No comprehensive statistics on police-related deaths exist in Canada, but the Coalition listed names of some 180 people who have died—in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia—either during police operations or in custody.
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