More than a year after being passed by MLAs, the NWT’s Missing Persons Act has come into force, the territorial government says.
The delay involved the territory deciding how the act’s regulations should work.
The regulations handle things like:
- procedures for the way police ask to access records or carry out searches;
- procedures and requirements for officers making emergency demands; and
- how people whose information has been accessed will be told.
“The new legislation has been put in place to provide additional tools to assist police in investigating reports of missing persons in the Northwest Territories,” the GNWT stated on Wednesday.
“The purpose of the new law is to assist police in locating a missing person where no criminal investigation is underway.
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“Under the Act, once a resident is established to be a missing person, police officers are able to request information contained in client records with an urgent demand, an order for the production of records, or a search warrant.”
The legislation also allows RCMP access in some circumstances to information from banks, colleges and other institutions during a missing persons investigation.
More: Read the act and the regulations
Some families of missing people in the NWT have backed efforts to introduce this kind of legislation.
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RCMP initially suggested a lack of missing persons legislation in the NWT had complicated efforts to find Frank Gruben, a 30-year-old Gwich’in Inuvialuit man from Aklavik who was last seen in Fort Smith on May 6, 2023 – and whose disappearance remains unexplained nearly three years later.
Though a senior RCMP official later walked back that suggestion, Frank’s friends and family have maintained calls for such legislation to come into force.
“This legislation advances a key commitment under the GNWT’s Action Plan in response to the Calls for Justice on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,” minister for the status of women Lucy Kuptana was quoted as saying, “and provides reassurance to families and communities that police have the right tools in their search for missing persons.”
