Last week, Wab Kinew won the provincial election to become premier of Manitoba and, in doing so, became the first-ever First Nations premier of a Canadian province.

A landfill sat at the center of the race. Police believe that the bodies of two women murdered by a serial killer are buried in the landfill, but officials have rejected plans to search the landfill for their remains. During the election, Manitoba's incumbent premier ran a tasteless campaign opposing the landfill search. Knowing they were fighting a losing campaign, Stefanson ran last-minute ads reassuring voters that "You're in the voting booth alone... vote how you feel, not how others say you should... Vote like no one is watching," which maybe said the quiet part loud: Voting for us is shameful.

In his campaign, Kinew promised to search the landfil. And, as soon as he won, the federal government announced funding for a new study on the landfill. The study will cost three-quarters of a million dollars. You might be asking yourself, like I did: if that's how much the study costs, how much will the dig cost? The answer is: around $100 million dollars.

Ten years ago, I wrote about Halifax's landfill. In the nineties, Halifax built one of the most advanced landfills in the world, where a team sifts through every piece of trash before it goes in the hole. The team catches explosives, toxic materials, guns, and — yes — bodies. Or rather, they did, until murderers realized they couldn't dispose of bodies in the garbage anymore. At the time, the garbage-sifting operation cost about $10 million a year, about 1% of Halifax's $1 billion annual operating budget, and about 10% of the cost to search the landfill in Manitoba.

Conservatives in Manitoba ran a campaign that balked at that price. Who would pay $100 million to search for human remains? (The Titan submersible search, which was originally billed as a rescue mission, may have cost the Canadian Coast Guard around $20 million.) But — as the newspaper ads demonstrate — they also felt some degree of shame. That makes sense. Because, before you can discuss whether or not $100 million is too much to spend to recover human remains you have to acknowledge how we got here. How do we arrive in a place where a serial killer can murder four Indigenous women, and two of them wind up buried in a landfill? How do we live in a society where humans can be thrown away like garbage? To have talk about the landfill dig, you must first face the fact that we have erred as community. We have made some terrible mistake to arrive here.

We all know the shame that comes from ignoring a mistake. Sometimes we just live with that shame. But there are some mistakes that we have to correct — no matter what the cost.