Let’s all thank Bernard Valcourt for reminding us of the purpose of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Even before he read it, Mr. Valcourt, the New Brunswick Conservative politician who was once Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, responded to reports about what the inquiry’s final conclusion would say. “How much did this sham cost taxpayers?” he tweeted in French. “Who learned what from this so-called analysis and report?”
With that, Mr. Valcourt not only sparked controversy, he also highlighted the point of the inquiry – to say that something deeply wrong had happened, and that it was worth looking into. And that is worth repeating to the many people who, like Mr. Valcourt, figure that murders are for the police to solve and not for a costly inquiry to address.
That’s not because of the chilling statistics. It’s because there’s a distinct group in Canada who believed their mothers and daughters were disappearing – or being killed – at alarming rates, that no one seemed to be listening, or not enough, and that if this happened to people in another group in, say, Kitchener or Edmundston, there’d be a public inquiry.
Mr. Valcourt rejected calls for an inquiry when he was minister. But on this occasion, his tweets were triggered by the inquiry’s leaked conclusion that the deaths over decades constituted genocide. And he won’t be alone.
Mr. Valcourt appears to have interpreted “genocide” as a deliberate attempt to exterminate a people. Most people would. They associate it with organized mass murder, like the Holocaust. But the inquiry’s report indicated it was working with broader academic definitions that include harm to members of a racial group or people, even as a result of systemic factors rather than intentional ones. The inquiry never even settled on a definition. Chief commissioner Marion Buller wrote that she wanted the inquiry to use “hard words to address hard truths.” Instead, it focused debate on a term most will misunderstand.
Still, that more basic point to the inquiry was important. The final report included the words and stories of relatives and survivors, with a common thread of feeling isolated or ignored, like family members who reported sisters and daughters missing and were told they were probably out partying.
In one fundamental sense, what some Indigenous women wanted from this inquiry was an airing of what happened and an authoritative conclusion that it was wrong. There have been social milestones in combatting racism that impelled change, such as the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that declared school segregation unconstitutional. The inquiry didn’t have the power to deliver a legal verdict, but it could make an authoritative statement.
But school segregation was a specific form of discrimination. The murders and disappearances of women across the country were far more complex. And, unfortunately, the inquiry’s report lacked focus.
The inquiry didn’t do one big thing that many relatives wanted: It did not dig into the details of case after case to find out what really happened to their loves ones. One of the inquiry’s 231 “calls for justice” – the recommendations – was that a National Task Force be set up to do that.
There were direct conclusions in some recommendations, such as calling on governments to establish Indigenous police oversight bodies that could “observe and oversee” cases of police negligence or misconduct, and cases involving indigenous peoples generally, or for more Indigenous judges and police officers.
But the report’s big problem is that it went to too many places, from history to the law to abstract sociological constructs, in a report of more than a thousand pages that was often laden with jargon.
Its 231 recommendations are so numerous that governments will find it easier to dodge questions on any specific one. Some are vague, such as asking for governments to put together a national action plan to address violence, or “take all the necessary measures to prevent, investigate, punish, and compensate” for violence. A few jump beyond the mandate: The report calls for a guaranteed basic income for all Canadians. The report didn’t have the power of priorities.
That doesn’t mean the inquiry didn’t have a purpose. At its most basic, it was to respond to the feeling of disrespect and neglect, to look at systemic racism, and acknowledge what the inquiry called a “national tragedy of epic proportions” – precisely because so many said it wasn’t worth it.
Campbell Clark