“When (Indigenous Affairs) Minister Carolyn Bennett was speaking, and Minister (of Status of Women) Patty Hajdu, I was having trouble believing them”, Williams said on Wednesday, hours after the inquiry’s terms of reference were announced.
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She’s also watched as a campaign that started with posters tacked to lamp posts grew into a national movement that culminated on Wednesday with the federal government finally revealing the details of its long-awaited inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women.
Part of the funding will go to the provinces and territories to establish new family information liaison units within their existing victim services departments, as well as for victims’ services projects across the country to directly help the families of indigenous missing women and girls.
The inquiry was announced past year by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, fulfilling a campaign pledge from the October federal election.
The process – created to be arm’s length from government once it is up and running on September 1 – is expected to last at least two years and cost at least $53.8 million – $13.8 million than was originally expected.
A 2014 report and an update past year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police identified 1,049 murdered and 172 missing aboriginal women between 1980 and 2012.
It is critical that this support be provided by a range of Indigenous experts-elders, social workers, health care providers, policing authorities, education specialists, and others-that can provide immediate and continuous support to women and girls in their own communities.
Pauktuutit, a national organization representing Inuit women in Canada, wants the federal government to appoint an Inuk woman as a sixth commissioner.
A final report on improving native women’s safety and ways to commemorate the dead will be released in 2018. Many were teenagers. In several cases, the investigations were said to be perfunctory because the women came from impoverished reserves and had nobody to advocate for them. That allows the commissioners to examine the actions of all jurisdictions, including the role that provincial and municipal police forces and child-welfare agencies may have played. The inquiry will be led by Marion Buller, the first female aboriginal judge in British Columbia.
Posters of missing women hang at a Vancouver shop in 2001.
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The Native Women’s Association of Canada also said that they welcome the inquiry but are concerned that “there is no explicit mention of the need to work with the justice partners in order to make appropriate recommendations to ensure that there are changes in that system”. Trudeau’s plan stipulates inquiry into missing indigenous women, investments in indigenous people’s education, as well as and an overview of the legislation imposed on indigenous people by the previous governments. “I think there’s still some work to be done, but now that burden falls on the shoulders of the commissioners to see what can be done to get justice and get answers for those families”. “This is especially critical given that numerous systemic issues that need to be changed are within systems that fall under provincial jurisdiction, including child welfare, health services and most police services”.
