About 20 people, including Vancouver East NDP MP Libby Davies and relatives of some victims of serial killer Robert Pickton, met today (August 26) at Vancouver City Hall to discuss how a public inquiry should proceed into the missing women.

The meeting was organized by sex-workers' advocate Jamie Lee Hamilton, and was attended by representatives of Vancouver Centre Liberal MP Hedy Fry and NDP MLA Jenny Kwan.

"We have established ourselves as a community committee to address safety for sex-trade workers," Hamilton told the Straight outside the committee room where the meeting was held.

Hamilton added that there was a consensus in the room that there must be a public inquiry into the handling of the Pickton case.

"We will establish and work on terms of references that we would like to see in the public inquiry," Hamilton stated. "We're also going to recommend a chair and an elder, a recognized elder, to oversee it."

When asked who the people in the group wanted to chair the inquiry, Hamilton responded that only one name was suggested: "Justice Thomas Berger."

Berger, a Vancouver lawyer and onetime B.C. NDP leader, is a former B.C. Supreme Court judge. He gained a national reputation as a forceful advocate of aboriginal rights when he was commissioner of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in the 1970s. In 2003, he chaired the Vancouver Election Commission.

The B.C. Liberal cabinet is expected to decide in September whether or not to order a public inquiry into the handling of the murdered and missing women cases in the Downtown Eastside.

Another person at the City Hall meeting, Vancouver aboriginal women's activist Edna Brass, told the Straight that the gathering was "very productive".

Sitting on a chair in the lobby outside the mayor's office, she recalled the time when a friend told her that she was going to meet Pickton at Oppenheimer Park.

"All I said was, 'Be safe'," Brass said.

She explained that she would like to see a database created for First Nations people living in the Downtown Eastside, which would trace them back to their home communities. However, Brass also emphasized that the inquiry should focus on all of Pickton's victims, and not just the aboriginal women who went missing.

"It caused me so much grief, so much suffering," she acknowledged. "It makes me feel sick sometimes just thinking about it. It makes me feel reclusive because I know so many people are in pain over it. I have friends that are suffering over this. You know, they're depressed or they're mourning. They've never had closure, and that's why we need a public inquiry."

Davies told the Straight that during the 1980s when she was a member of Vancouver city council, complaints about missing sex workers were not taken seriously.

"There were calls for a special task force and they rejected that," she said. "Why didn't they make the connections about what was going on? Why did they for so long resist the idea that a serial killer could be out there? Why wasn't there the cross-jurisdictional work?"

Vancouver East MP Libby Davies supports holding a public inquiry.

In addition, Davies recalled that when advocacy groups wanted to file complaints about missing women, they were told that they couldn't do this because they weren't family members.

"There were so many things that went wrong," she stated. "I feel it's deeply systemic within law enforcement how they view sex work and sex workers—that somehow they don't have any rights like you and I do."

Both Davies and Hamilton also noted that people at the meeting felt that an inquiry should probe the role of Crown counsel in Pickton's murder spree continuing for so many years. He was charged in 2002 with 26 killings, and was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder.

In 1997, Pickton attacked a sex worker at his Port Coquitlam farm, but the Crown didn't proceed to trial because the witness wasn't deemed to be credible.

"That was Crown that made that decision," Davies emphasized. "It wasn't the police. So what are the checks and balances on them? How do they deal with people who are viewed to be unstable?"

According to Hamilton, there was also some discussion at the meeting about a citizen-led inquiry, which would resemble a truth-and-reconciliation commission.

She said that this would give people in the community a chance to have their voices heard.

Davies strongly supports this in addition to a formal public inquiry.

"This has been a community that has been suffering grief and trauma and loss for decades," the NDP MP said of her constituents. "It's not only the individual families. It's the community as a whole. I really feel there has to be some community-directed process as well that may come out with its own recommendations."

Davies pointed out that if six nurses or students had gone missing at UBC, there would have been a huge outcry. She contrasted that to what happened when sex workers disappeared from the Downtown Eastside.

"They are like nonpersons," she claimed. "They are treated like garbage....They are not treated as credible witnesses. Their complaints aren't taken seriously. The violence they experience isn't dealt with."

Hamilton said the meeting was also attended by sex worker Sue Davis as well as by representatives of the WISH Drop-in Centre Society, Prostitution Alternatives Counselling and Education Society, the Pivot Legal Society, the PHS Community Services Society, and the February 14th memorial committee.

Sex worker Sue Davis explains why she wants an inquiry into the Pickton case.

In addition, Mary Clare Zak, the city's director of social planning, was at the meeting.

When Hamilton was asked how the group was able to hold the event in a City Hall committee room, she responded with a smile, "I just phoned up the city manager."

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.