Come into the fire with me. I need you to sit with this one, because I can’t carry it alone.
On August 13, 2026, the Parole Board of Canada granted full parole — effective immediately — to Brayden Bushby. The man who killed Barbara Kentner. The man who threw a trailer hitch out of a moving car at a 34-year-old Anishinaabe woman walking down a residential street in Thunder Bay with her sister, and laughed. Witnesses at trial said he could be heard yelling that he “got one” as they drove off.
He served five years. Barbara served a death sentence that took six months to carry out.
I’m not going to soften this for you. I’m not going to hand you a “both sides” framing so you feel comfortable finishing your coffee. I’m going to say it exactly how it is: in this country, a white man can target an Indigenous woman for who she is, kill her, and the system will find its way to letting him go home.
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It was January 2017. Bushby was drunk. Court heard he wanted to yell at “hookers” as they passed. Barbara Kentner was simply walking home with her sister, Melissa. Bushby lifted himself partway out of the car window and hurled a heavy trailer hitch at her. It struck her in the abdomen. He was heard laughing, calling out that he’d hit one.
Barbara survived the impact. Barely. She endured months of internal injuries and complications before she died on July 4, 2017. She was a mother, a sister, a cousin, an aunt. A member of Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation. Crown prosecutors, seeking eight to twelve years, told the court it is not uncommon in Thunder Bay for Indigenous people to have objects thrown at them from passing vehicles — that Bushby’s “joke” came out of a documented pattern of racial violence in that city, not a vacuum.
He was initially charged with first-degree murder. That got downgraded to manslaughter, a decision that stirred outrage on its own. In June 2021, Justice Helen Pierce sentenced him to eight years, reduced to seven years and eleven months for time served, and she was explicit that the sentence needed to send a message of denunciation and deterrence — that this attack rippled through Thunder Bay and through Indigenous peoples across the country.
That message lasted less than five years.
Barbara Kentner died six months after Bushby threw the hitch at her stomach in Thunder Bay. Photo: APTN
Bushby got day parole in August 2023. Within a year, the board revoked it. Documents show he’d been drinking — a direct violation, given alcohol fueled the killing in the first place. He failed a breathalyzer during a traffic stop. He fled the scene after reversing into another vehicle. He was a suspect in a stolen-vehicle investigation. And, while out on that day parole, he got a Confederate flag tattooed across his chest — a symbol the board itself called widely associated with racist ideology. When asked why, he told them the question was irrelevant.
Sit with that. A man convicted of a racially charged killing gets released, and the first thing he does with his freedom is ink a Confederate flag onto his body.
He went back to custody. And in August 2025, while inside, he was caught on surveillance cutting a swastika into the institutional lawn. The parole board’s own response was to assign him a Black cultural liaison officer. Bushby told them it “was not his finest moment,” that he hadn’t understood the symbol’s meaning until he took the programming. He denied holding racist beliefs and called it ignorance, not hate.
I want you to ask yourself something. How many chances does a system extend to a man who keeps showing you, in his own actions, exactly who he is? A swastika mowed into grass isn’t ignorance. A Confederate flag on your chest isn’t an accident. This is a man telling us, over and over, what he believes — and a parole board that keeps choosing to hear something else.
By this June, he was back on day parole. And on August 13, less than two months later, they gave him full parole. Free and clear.
Brayden Bushby (centre) arrives at the Courthouse Hotel on Monday, Nov. 2, 2020 for the start of his manslaughter trial in the death of Barbara Kentner. (Cory Nordstrom, Thunder Bay Television)
Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler didn’t mince words on behalf of the Executive Council. He called the decision “devastating news” for Barbara’s family, for Wabigoon Lake Ojibway First Nation, for all of Thunder Bay. He said the original sentencing was meant to send a strong message of deterrence, and that full parole “entirely undermined” it.
NAN pointed out that the parole board’s own decision acknowledges Bushby has shown a repeated pattern of high-risk behaviour, concerning attitudes supporting violence toward women, and possible ingrained racist attitudes. Their own paperwork says he hasn’t expressed remorse for Barbara — that he’s told them he simply “wants to move on.” And they let him go anyway.
NAN rejected the board’s conclusion that releasing him poses no undue risk to society. Anyone who understands even the basics of what Indigenous people face in Thunder Bay, the statement said, should be able to see that he remains a risk. Granting him parole sends a message — and it’s the wrong one.
Thunder Bay didn’t earn its reputation by accident. This is a city where young Indigenous people have turned up dead in its rivers with no real answers. Where families of missing and murdered Indigenous women have been met with indifference dressed up as process. Inquest after inquest, report after report, have named the same rot: systemic racism woven into policing, into institutions, into the fabric of how this city treats us.
Bushby is one man. But he’s also a mirror. This isn’t one broken man slipping through cracks. This is a system functioning exactly as it’s built to, protecting the people it was built to protect, and it was not built to protect us.
Ask Colten Boushie’s family what that looks like. Colten was a 22-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, shot in the head in 2016 by Gerald Stanley on a Saskatchewan farm. A jury with no visibly Indigenous members acquitted Stanley of murder and manslaughter in 2018. Different province, different weapon, same verdict underneath it all: an Indigenous life, and the system finds its way to letting the man responsible walk.
If you want to tell yourself Canada has moved past this, look at this file. Look at the tattoo. Look at the lawn. Look at the words “wants to move on.” There’s no third-party, arm’s-length way to interpret what’s written in black and white in a federal parole board’s own decision. This is hatred, and right now, hatred is winning.
Barbara Kentner deserved to walk home. She didn’t get that. And now, five years later, the man who took that from her gets to walk free while her family carries a grief that doesn’t get a parole date.
I’m not asking you to feel something performative about this and move on to your next scroll. I’m asking you to sit with the fact that this is what “justice” looks like for us in this country, and to ask yourself what you’re going to do the next time you have the chance to demand better.
Barbara Kentner was 34 when she died from medical complications in the months after being struck by a trailer hitch thrown at her from a moving vehicle. She was a member of Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation in northwestern Ontario. Photo: Jody Porter/CBC
Brandi Morin is a multi-award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is the founder of Indigenous Insider on Substack and the author of the national bestselling memoir Our Voice of Fire.
Sources:
Nishnawbe Aski Nation, “NAN Statement on Brayden Bushby Parole Decision,” August 18, 2026
https://www.nan.ca/news/nan-statement-on-brayden-bushby-parole-decision/
CBC News, “Man convicted in woman’s 2017 trailer hitch death in Thunder Bay, Ont., granted full parole,” August 18, 2026
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/brayden-bushby-granted-full-parole-9.7311268
The Globe and Mail, “Man who threw trailer hitch at Indigenous woman, killing her, is granted full parole, First Nations group says,” August 2026
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-brayden-bushby-parole-barbara-kentner-nan-indigenous/
CBC News, “Day parole revoked for Brayden Bushby, man convicted of trailer hitch death of Barbara Kentner in Thunder Bay,” July 31, 2024
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/bushby-day-parole-revoked-1.7280988
APTN News, “Parole revoked for man who killed Barbara Kentner in Thunder Bay,” September 2024
https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/parole-revoked-for-man-who-killed-barbara-kentner-in-thunder-bay/
CBC News, “Brayden Bushby gets day parole in Barbara Kentner trailer hitch death in Thunder Bay after 1st one was revoked,” December 15, 2025
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/brayden-bushby-day-parole-9.7016580
CBC News, “Man convicted in 2017 trailer hitch death in Thunder Bay gets day parole extension,” June 4, 2026
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/brayden-bushby-day-parole-extension-9.7223730
TBNewsWatch, “Brayden Bushby’s day parole revoked,” July 2024
https://www.tbnewswatch.com/local-news/brayden-bushbys-day-parole-revoked-9289448
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