‘We will … make this happen’
Premiers commit to commission recommendations after meeting with native leaders
Canada’s premiers support the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations and will act on them with or without Ottawa’s help, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Paul Davis said Wednesday.
“We will together, jointly, make this happen,’’ Davis told a news conference after hosting provincial and territorial leaders and the heads of five national native groups in Happy ValleyGoose Bay, N.L.
Davis said the provinces have not only pledged to act on the commission’s 94 recommendations but, in some cases, have already started.
“They’re important commitments that we need to follow up on.’’
Otherwise, what Davis described as the commission’s important work could be wasted, he said. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s longstanding absence from first ministers’ meetings is a missed chance for collaboration, Davis said.
“We all believe that the federal government should be providing that leadership. In the absence of the federal government, instead of just letting it sit and wait, we’re going to take those steps.’’
Davis said Manitoba will host a second national roundtable on missing and murdered aboriginal women to follow up on last winter’s event in Ottawa.
The RCMP has reported that almost 1,200 aboriginal women have been murdered or have vanished since 1980.
The 2011 National Household Survey suggests indigenous women make up 4.3 per cent of Canada’s female population.
But police say they’re victims in 16 per cent of female homicides and account for 11 per cent of missing women.
The premiers made a united push last summer for a public inquiry into the issue but Ottawa has refused.
Federal officials who attended the national roundtable in February said justice investments and a five-year, $25-million plan to reduce related violence are a better approach.
Dawn Lavell Harvard, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, said she was pleased with such efforts despite what she called a lack of respect from Ottawa.
Violence against indigenous women and girls is “a grave violation of human rights,’’ Lavell Harvard told the closing news conference. She lashed out at the federal government for not attending Wednesday’s meeting.
“It is an insult to the memories of those women and girls that they’re not here.’’
Lavell Harvard called it a “slap in the face.’’
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said he was satisfied that the provinces are taking the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report released last month seriously. It described as “cultural genocide’’ the suffering borne by generations of aboriginal children in once mandatory residential schools. It estimated more than 6,000 boys and girls, about one in 25, died in the institutions. Scores of others endured horrific physical and sexual abuse.