Missing and Missed
In April 2021, the Honourable Gloria J. Epstein of the Court of Appeal for Ontario released the four-volume final report of her Independent Civilian Review into how the Toronto Police Service handled missing-persons investigations later linked to Bruce McArthur. The Review interviewed more than 1,200 people, made 151 recommendations, and made specific named findings on the actions of the lead investigators on Project Houston (2012–2014) — the task force whose disbandment preceded four further killings. This page files what the Review found, in the Review's own structure.
The Review at a glance
- 2018-04Toronto Police Services Board commissions an independent civilian review after Bruce McArthur's arrest (Jan 2018) and amid sustained criticism from the LGBTQ2S+ community that earlier disappearances had been under-investigated.
- 2018-08The Honourable Gloria J. Epstein, formerly of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, is appointed to lead the Review.
- 2018–2021The Review interviews 1,200+ people, examines TPS missing-persons records, and consults with the affected communities.
- 2021-04-13Final report released: Missing and Missed — Report of the Independent Civilian Review into Missing Person Investigations. Four volumes. 151 recommendations. Findings include “serious flaws” and systemic discrimination in how missing-persons cases involving members of marginalized communities were handled.
- 2022-04One year after release, CBC reports the Toronto Police Service has implemented none of the recommendations.
- 2023-02TPS reports it has implemented approximately 10% of the recommendations.
Project Houston — the disbanded task force
Project Houston was the Toronto Police Service task force struck in November 2012 to investigate the disappearances of three men last seen in the Church and Wellesley area: Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Majeed Kayhan. The lead investigators on the project included Detective Constable Loria and Detective Sergeant Hank Idsinga. The task force was disbanded in April 2014. A police spokesperson said it had been disbanded because the investigation had “failed to uncover any criminal wrongdoing.”
Bruce McArthur went on to kill four more men after Project Houston was disbanded: Selim Esen (April 2017), Andrew Kinsman (June 2017), Dean Lisowick (between May 2016 and July 2017), and Soroush Mahmudi (August 2015 — in the gap between Project Houston's wind-down and Project Prism's opening). Project Prism, the successor task force established in August 2017 to investigate Esen's and Kinsman's disappearances, was led by Idsinga in his Detective Sergeant role and produced McArthur's arrest on January 18, 2018.
Named findings — the Review's record on Project Houston
What follows is summarised from the Independent Civilian Review's public report. Officers are named where the Review names them.
Finding 1 — The silverfoxx51 identification lead was abandoned
The username and email address silverfoxx51 appeared in the computer data of two missing men, Skandaraj Navaratnam and Abdulbasir Faizi. The subscriber to that account was, in fact, Bruce McArthur. Identifying the subscriber would have been a routine investigative step.
The Review found that Detective Constable Loria and Detective Sergeant Idsinga “recognized the significance” of identifying the subscriber, yet the task “remained unaddressed for many months — and was addressed only after both Detective Constable Loria and Detective Sergeant Idsinga had left the project.”
The Review treats this as a representative example of a broader case-management failure on Project Houston. The task was not on the action log; the absence from the log is itself flagged in the Review.
Sources: Missing and Missed, the public report of the Independent Civilian Review, released by the Toronto Police Services Board on April 13, 2021. Hosted at tps.ca/.../report-independent-civilian-review-missing-person-investigations; volume excerpt at scribd Vol I.
Finding 2 — McArthur's November 2013 interview was never uploaded to PowerCase
Bruce McArthur was interviewed by Project Houston investigators in November 2013 as a potential witness, not as a suspect. PowerCase is the case-management system used by the Toronto Police Service to allow officers across investigations to search records and identify persons of interest.
The Review found that “neither the videotaped interview nor summary was uploaded into PowerCase,” preventing McArthur from being identified as a person of interest by other investigators — including, years later, the Project Prism officers tasked with finding the killer of Andrew Kinsman.
The Review further found that the Project Houston files “were not set up to permit easy searches for keywords such as ‘Bruce,’ ‘Bruce McArthur,’ ‘landscaper,’ ‘landscaping,’ or ‘gardener,’” with the result that “extensive information collected by officers was often never used.”
Sources: Missing and Missed, Independent Civilian Review (April 13, 2021); Globe and Mail (Mar 30, 2018) — pre-Review reporting on the 2013 interview.
Finding 3 — PowerCase recording discipline was not enforced
Investigative assignments on Project Houston were supposed to be recorded in PowerCase with completion dates and priorities, so that supervisors could monitor the status of outstanding work.
The Review found that “assignments or actions were often assigned verbally and not recorded or tracked in a formalized way.” The silverfoxx51 assignment, for example, “was not even listed on the action log,” with the result that “the investigation completely overlooked the fact that it was never completed.”
This finding is institutional: the Review treats it as a Project Houston case-management failure rather than an individual breach. The named-officer record on Finding 1, however, ties the failure pattern directly to the lead-investigator level on which Idsinga sat.
Sources: Missing and Missed, Independent Civilian Review (April 13, 2021).
Finding 4 — Systemic discrimination against marginalized victim communities
Beyond the named-officer findings, the Review made a series of institutional findings that are central to the public memory of the report.
The Review concluded that “the disappearances of Toronto men connected to McArthur were given less attention or priority than the cases deserved” and that these victims belonged to marginalized communities — in particular gay men, racialized men, and men of immigrant background. The Review specifically observed that “proper missing-persons investigations should not depend on whose voices are the loudest.”
This finding is institutional and applies to the Service as a whole, including but not limited to Project Houston. It is the load-bearing public-memory finding from the Review.
Sources: Missing and Missed, Independent Civilian Review (April 13, 2021); On The Record — summary coverage.
The implementation record
The Review's 151 recommendations are tracked publicly by the Toronto Police Service at tps.ca/.../missing-and-missed-implementation.
- 2022-04One year after the Review's release, CBC reported that TPS had not implemented any of the 151 recommendations. Source: CBC — A year on (Apr 2022).
- 2023-02TPS reported approximately 10% of the recommendations had been implemented. Source: CBC — Implementation update (Feb 2023).
- 2023-04Toronto Police Service released a public progress report on the recommendations. Source: Global News — Progress report.
Implementation status as of this page's publication is approximately partial; the official TPS implementation tracker is the canonical source.
Editorial — the memoir-and-review timeline
This section is editorial framing, not a Review finding. The Review's findings are filed above; this section observes the public-record sequence between the Review and Idsinga's 2025 memoir. Readers should weigh the framing against the primary sources directly.
The Independent Civilian Review's public report — including its named findings on Project Houston — was released on April 13, 2021. Four years and one month later, in 2025, Idsinga's memoir The High Road: Confessions of a Homicide Cop was published by Simon & Schuster. The memoir's public framing centres on Idsinga's own critique of TPS senior leadership for racism, antisemitism, alcoholism, and cronyism — a whistleblower frame.
The memoir's media rollout coincided with the unfolding Project South prosecution (eight TPS officers charged February 2026) and was amplified by Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington (whose column has used the phrase “the Hank Idsinga effect” for the police-board probe activity that followed) and by Liberal-affiliated Canadian political consultant Warren Kinsella (whose adjacent book on antisemitic propaganda is publicly photographed alongside Idsinga's memoir on Idsinga's X account).
The publicly-available sources show: that the Review made specific, named findings about Idsinga's Project Houston tenure in April 2021; that the memoir's media-cycle treatment focuses on Idsinga's critique of others rather than on the Review's named findings about him; and that the memoir's amplifier network is domestic Canadian (Warmington at Toronto Sun, Kinsella at Daisy Group), not foreign-state.
The dossier files what the public record contains. Whether the memoir's timing and framing represent a genuine institutional whistleblower or a strategic re-narration of an officer with named findings against him is a question the public sources do not settle. The dossier preserves the citations so readers can decide.