KENORA — Archie McKay has been sentenced to imprisonment for life.
The Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug man was convicted last May on five counts of second-degree murder for setting the fire that killed his partner, Geraldine Chapman, their daughter, Shyra Chapman, and three children in Geraldine’s care, Angel McKay, Karl Cutfeet and Hailey Chapman.
Justice J.S. Fregeau handed down the sentence in a Kenora courtroom on Monday.
Fregeau imposed concurrent sentences for each of the five murders. McKay will serve 25 years of imprisonment before being eligible for parole.
“He imposed the highest sentence possible in Canadian law on Archie,” said Assistant Crown Attorney James Cavanagh, who worked on this case with colleagues Mike Purcell and Tara Schuck. “It was clear that in so doing he was mindful of the horrific loss to the family members, the neighbours and to the community as a whole.”
He said that in the hours following the house fire and throughout the investigation, McKay “told all kinds of lies about where he’d been and what had happened. But eventually, over a year later he was charged, in 2020,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh said it was a long investigation because the house burned right to the ground.
Fregeau had to carefully navigate the difficulties of sentencing under Gladue principles for First Nations offenders, said Cavanagh. “His Honour found that this was one of those very rare exceptional cases where, notwithstanding that Archie was a victim of sexual abuse himself, he lived in pretty terrible conditions. But even taking them into account, this is an extremely rare case where the sentence has to be set at the maximum.”
Under Gladue principles, said Cavanagh, “the courts are asked to take into account the horrific effects of colonialism, of intergenerational trauma of residential schools, of the terrible living conditions, poverty, substance abuse, suicide, that plague the northern communities and bear that in mind in terms of the moral blameworthiness of a First Nations accused.”
But, he explained, some of the criticism was that this works in unfairness to First Nations victims of a crime such as this one. “When you do take that into account, you’re not considering the victims of domestic abuse or child abuse. Their abuser gets a less significant sentence than a white person for example.”
Fregeau stated in his ruling that “I have come to the conclusion that the case before this Court is also one of those cases where the crimes are so heinous, and the aggravating factors so compelling, that the defendant’s unique circumstances as an Indigenous offender do not affect the period of parole ineligibility that would otherwise be imposed.”
