A long-awaited national inquiry into murdered and missing Aboriginal women will begin September 1 at an estimated cost of CAN$53.8 million, the government announced Wednesday.
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Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett has noted this is a “placeholder” budget and she has consistently stressed the need to get the inquiry right.
“These units will help families deal with the trauma of their loss and help them connect to the resources that they require”, Wilson-Raybould said.
“This inquiry is needed to achieve justice and healing and to put an end to this ongoing and bad tragedy”.
The inquiry, which will be overseen by five commissioners, will look at the systemic issues that lead to violence against indigenous women and girls, the Canadian government said.
BBC reporter Joanna Jolly went on the trail of the murdered and missing to find out why so many of Winnipeg’s Aboriginal women and girls have been killed. In 2013 Human Rights Watch issued a report on police treatment of indigenous women in northern British Columbia that documented not only police failures to protect indigenous women from violence, but also police abuse of these women and girls.
The commission falls under the part of the federal Inquiries Act governing public inquiries, which means it will have the power to summon witnesses and compel evidence and testimony, just like a civil court.
“We can not move forward until we face and recognise and put a stop to this ongoing tragedy”.
Hart Perley, who works with the Indigenous Women’s Association of the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq Territories in New Brunswick, said she is disappointed that none of the commissioners appointed are not from Atlantic Canada.
As we’ve reported, an inquiry like this was one of the campaign promises of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada.
The inquiry is the culmination of years of lobbying by native leaders, activists and victims’ families seeking to know why more than 1,200 indigenous women were murdered or have gone missing over the past three decades.
But the group also raised some concerns with the commission’s mandate.
The New Westminster restorative justice program heard its first criminal sentencing cases in 2006.
She also pointed to the justice system, saying sentencing guidelines also need to be reviewed.
“How well the inquiry can actually serve that objective is going to depend to a large degree on the co-operation that it receives from the provincial and territorial governments, from policing services – and questions remain about that”. Williams said she has more questions than answers and is not sure if she is ready to embrace the inquiry.
“I expect that this national public inquiry will clearly set a path forward to end this ongoing national tragedy, to look at ways to prevent this from continuing, from happening again, ways all levels of government and institutions and communities right across the country can work to ensure that we learn from this awful tragedy”, he said.
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“What we were told is that unlike other commissions, people don’t want rooms full of lawyers sorting things out in an adversarial way”, Bennett said.
