Canada Releases Details On Inquiry Into Murdered, Missing Indigenous Women

Overall, said Jarrett, Wednesday’s announcement was a positive one, and she added Saunders’ family wasn’t willing to let her death be in vain.

As for the $16-million being provided to the provinces to create a family liaison unit within their victim services programs, Doyle-Bedwell said the amount falls short of what is needed to help families and survivors.

But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has linked the violence to racism, sexism, colonialism, poverty, unemployment, lack of safe transportation, mental health and substance abuse.

“I feel a little bit of relief in the fact we got something accomplished for Loretta, and for all of the women who’ve been murdered and all of the women who are still missing”, she said.

“A 2014 study by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found that almost 1,200 aboriginal women were murdered or went missing between 1980 and 2012”.

The federal government formally announced the inquiry August 3 at a morning news conference in Gatineau, Que., naming the inquiry’s five commissioners, led by chair Marion Buller, a British Columbia-based First Nations judge.

If a young girl went missing in your community, would you go out and look for her?

Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard with the Native Women’s Association of Canada is impressed with the composition of the commission and believes that this inquiry will highlight what needs to be fixed.

The Government of Nunavut weighed in on the inquiry August 3 in a carefully-worded statement that offered its cooperation with the federal inquiry, while chiding Ottawa on its choice of representative.

Reconciliation won’t happen if this commission refuses to acknowledge that the police are right when they say that most First Nations female homicide victims – like most murdered women – are killed by men they know.

The inquiry will be led by five commissioners and chaired by BC First Nations Judge Marion Buller.

According to the Inquiries Act, the commissioners will have the same powers as any court in a civil case to compel witnesses to give evidence.

“Obviously we trust that commission will make arrangements to make sure anybody who needs to be heard will be heard”.

“Violence against women and girls, especially Indigenous women and girls, is a systemic human rights issue”. After documenting how indigenous women and girls were under-protected by the police in northern BC-as well as how some had experienced outright police abuse-we saw the urgent need for an independent, impartial inquiry. It focused on women reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1997 and 2002. We have a disproportionate number of Indigenous people who are in the criminal justice system. “For too long in this country, indigenous women and girls have gone missing without much notice, without much reaction, without society in general realizing the tragedies that are among us”.

Indeed, there is tremendous distrust of police and government forces in Indigenous communities, as the police for decades abducted Indigenous children and forced them into the abusive residential school system.

NWAC had also called on the government to include engaging with the provinces and territories in the inquiry’s mandate.