MMIW inquiry asks for more time and money
But some query need for 2-year extension
• The promises are enormous. In the next two years, the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women says it will hold up to 21 institutional and expert hearings to investigate issues ranging from human trafficking and sexual exploitation to health care and addiction services. It will commission external reports about the criminal justice system, colonial violence, advocacy and the media.
It will conduct original research into the Indian Act and certain sections of the Constitution. It will continue to hear from the hundreds of survivors and family members who still want a chance to tell their stories.
That’s if the national inquiry is granted the two-year extension it requested this week, which would extend its mandate through to the end of 2020, and the up to $50 million in additional funding it says it needs to pay for it, money that would nearly double its budget.
“Any extension of less than two years would severely limit the value of our work,” the inquiry’s four commissioners wrote in a letter to Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett.
It would represent a significant expansion of the inquiry’s work — especially noteworthy given the slow progress commissioners have made so far, including on their ambitious commitment to review police files. Notably, Tuesday’s letter revealed that a forensic review isn’t yet underway, while the inquiry claimed last July that it already had a forensic team reviewing files.
During a teleconference on Tuesday, Commissioner Michèle Audette said the police review remains a major priority.
And the inquiry has long maintained that many of its delays have been caused by logistical and bureaucratic challenges that are now being resolved.
Still, early reactions from Indigenous organizations make it clear the inquiry no longer has unconditional support from many quarters. Even those groups that support an extension are ambivalent, and say changes are needed if the long-awaited inquiry, launched in September 2016, is to succeed at all.
To date, the Assembly of First Nations has backed the inquiry’s request, while the Métis National Council and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Inuit in Canada, have yet to take a position. But other groups, such as Pauktuutit, an organization representing Inuit women, are already saying they can’t support the ask for more time and money.
“We’re going to wait for two more years for the recommendations to be complete and acted on, and we feel that how many more women are going to be murdered while that’s happening?” said Pauktuutit president Rebecca Kudloo. Frustrated with the inquiry’s progress to date, Kudloo said the $50 million the inquiry is asking for would be better spent providing tangible services in remote communities, like shelters and addictions counselling.
At this point, she said, more original research is not where the inquiry should be focusing. “There’s been so much work done on violence against women and what we need as Inuit that I don’t think the inquiry should start from scratch,” she said.
Kudloo thinks the inquiry should continue to gather information through the end of 2018, and then take just six months to complete its report and make recommendations.
Melanie Omeniho, president of the Women of the Métis Nation, said her organization has also had enough, claiming the inquiry has excluded Métis women. In their letter to Bennett, the commissioners say their mandate limits their ability to “engage fully with the Métis.” But Omeniho disagrees.
“We think they’ve had ample opportunity and they’ve just failed to include them,” she said, pointing out that Marilyn Poitras, the lone Métis commissioner, left the inquiry last summer. “I’m not saying throw this under the bus. … I just don’t think two more years is going to help us get there.”
Even those that support the extension sound more cautious than enthusiastic.
“If we don’t support this, we are not sure that anything will happen otherwise,” said Francyne Joe, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC). This inquiry was a long time coming, she said. “We don’t want to lose the momentum.”
But the association’s support doesn’t come without strings attached. Joe said the organization wants to take a more active role. Until now, NWAC has been participating in the community hearings as a volunteer organization, but Joe said the association should get part of whatever new funding the inquiry receives to help with the new hearings and research.
The latest indication that the inquiry needs help, she said, is that it failed to ask for more money before the 2018 budget was delivered. “It really makes me think that the national inquiry needs to have some assistance.”
NWAC isn’t alone in looking for funding from the inquiry to get more heavily involved. Robert Bertrand, national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, said his organization is still waiting on a response to a funding application from the national inquiry.
“It seems to me that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing,” he said. “What I’m thinking is these commissioners had all the best intentions, but I guess none of them have ever been on this type of commission, this type of inquiry, and they were just set a-sail with no rudder on their boats.”