Tragic history of Giant Mine murders holds hard lessons, but also hope, say podcast producers

Sunday marks a sombre anniversary in Yellowknife: 30 years, to the day, since the underground explosion at the Giant gold mine.

A bomb, planted intentionally by a Yellowknife man later convicted of murder, killed nine miners who had crossed a picket line during one of the most bitter labour disputes in Canadian history.

Giant — Murder Underground, a new CBC podcast, looks back at that time in Yellowknife's history and how those who lived through it view it now.

CBC's Marc Winkler spoke with podcast host Rachel Zelniker and producer Peter Sheldon about what they learned and why they felt this story was an important one to tell.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Rachel, why did you want to create this podcast?

Zelniker: Well, for all its tragedy, it is undoubtedly a fascinating story. It has much to teach us about labour law, about power dynamics and conflict, about the lingering impact of trauma, about shame and doing things you later regret. And in the words of the people I talked to, it's also a story that some worry is at risk of being forgotten, kind of starting to fade from public consciousness.

I wanted to ask — have all the lessons truly been learned from this time? How does a labour dispute spiral into murder? And, 30 years later, what are the lingering impacts on the people who lived through this? So these questions kind of are at the heart of why we wanted to revisit and play a role in documenting this major part of our city's history on this anniversary.

It's such a fraught and tragic story. How did people react when you contacted them to talk about this?

Zelniker: It was sensitive for everyone I talked to. Sometimes, I talked to people for weeks who lived all the hate, the violence, the anger. And while they felt it was [an] important story to tell, they eventually changed their minds about participating. They just worried that reliving it would be too painful.

Then there were others who didn't want to talk to me — who didn't think we should bring this up at all.

In the end, I spoke with over 20 sources on the record, and everyone I talked to believed it was a story people needed to hear [and] hopefully learn lessons [from] so nothing like that ever happens again. That was the common thread, and 30 years has also allowed for a lot of reflection, so some people who refused to talk about this for years were finally ready.

What did people specifically want to tell you when you did talk to them?

Zelniker: I spoke with multiple union members, community members, police, labour professors, and they are all still united in this belief that the lesson regarding replacement workers still hasn't been fully learned. Quebec and British Columbia are the only provinces with universal anti-replacement-worker laws, and that's baffling for people who lived through this tragedy and think that, had that kind of a ban been in place, things just wouldn't have spiralled as they did.