The real reason Winnipeg police aren't searching the landfills

Jeremy Skibicki is accused of first-degree murder in the deaths of several women who went missing from Winnipeg’s North End. Police believe he is a serial killer who operated in the vicinity of soup kitchens and warming shelters, preying on vulnerable Indigenous women.

Much of the attention in the case over the last year has been centred on the landfill where authorities believe the victims’ bodies are hidden. How would a search be conducted? How much would it cost? Is it even possible? The issue made it all the way to the province’s fall election, which the NDP won, in part on a promise to search the landfills.

In the March issue of Maclean’s, the investigative reporter Rachel Browne attempts to answer those questions. Her story, “A Killer Among Them,” teases out why the Winnipeg landfill search became so polarizing. But she also spotlights questions that have received much less attention: who was Jeremy Skibicki, and what dark forces might have propelled him to commit such ghastly crimes? Her grisly and captivating feature goes way beyond the headlines and sheds light on a troubled Canadian city.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

Bob Tolman’s family has been raising cattle in Alberta for four generations. But water is everything to a farmer, and 2021 brought a drought as devastating as the 1930s dust bowl—followed by more back-to-back dry spells. Farmers in the area spent hours every day hauling water to their pastures, and the price of cattle feed rose beyond affordability. Tolman lost sleep trying to puzzle together a solution. “We waited and waited for rain. When it didn’t come, we finally decided to approach our neighbour about a deal to buy our cattle and rent our land,” Tolman writes.

Soon after Joël Louiseize enrolled at Concordia University, the Quebec government announced that tuition for out-of-province Canadian students would nearly double from about $9,000 to $17,000 per year. (Quebec has since walked this back to $12,000.) The change was the last straw for him and his English-speaking partner, who had already been struggling with language difficulties in Montreal. So they’re moving. “Deciding to leave Quebec wasn’t just about escaping tuition hikes. It was about seeking a new home where we feel valued and accepted for who we are,” Louiseize writes in this essay for Maclean’s.

Marcel LeBrun made millions as a software tycoon, then funnelled his fortune into 12 Neighbours, a planned community of 99 affordable tiny homes in Fredericton. In this feature from the March 2024 print issue, Maclean’s writer Sarah Treleaven writes, “LeBrun’s gargantuan act of altruism, channelled so efficiently into diminutive 240-square-foot homes, has raised questions about what the country’s policy-makers might learn about how to rectify its housing woes from one man with deep pockets—one who stepped in where the government has failed.”

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