Thunder Bay: podcast about Canada's hate crime and murder capital is a cross between Serial and Crimetown

The remote north Ontario city of Thunder Bay leads Canada in murders and hate crimes and features a local government mired in scandal, from a mayor who was charged with extortion to a police chief who went on trial for obstruction of justice.

The city has two main populations: the largest group of Finnish-descended people outside of Finland, and indigenous First Nations people, who suffer routine and violent harassment, from verbal slurs to having missiles hurled at them from passing cars to allegations that white locals kidnap passed-out indigenous people who have drunk too much to defend themselves and throw them in the river to drown.

The excellent podcast network Canadaland (previously) crowdfunded a special fund to pay for long-term, in-depth investigation of the corruption, racism and crime in Thunder Bay, hosted by Ryan McMahon, a First Nations reporter who spent his own boyhood in Thunder Bay.

The first two episodes are live and they are riveting. As McMahon says in the first episode, he's not trying to solve a murder, he's trying to solve the city, to dig into the ugly conflict that is painfully evident and also routinely denied.

Locals call it Murder Bay. It might be the most dangerous city for Indigenous youth in the world. But to others, it's their white nirvana. Host Ryan McMahon wants to know - not who killed all those kids, but what killed them. This is Thunder Bay.

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