Liberals risk a process that could go on and on

Inquiry could backfire

The promised inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women hasn’t started yet. But it is already growing in scope.

During the election campaign, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau vowed to authorize a full public inquiry into the roughly 1,200 aboriginal women and girls who, according to the RCMP, went missing or were murdered between 1980 and 2014.

The aim, as expressed in the Liberal platform, was to come up with concrete recommendations “to solve these crimes and prevent future ones.”

But after talking to aboriginal people across Canada, Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett has announced she wants something more.

Specifically, she wants the inquiry to also determine whether the police have lowballed the number of women and girls murdered. She said she now believes there are “way more” than 1,200 victims

Bennett also told reporters that the inquiry should also hear evidence from indigenous females who were assaulted but not killed.

At one level, casting a broader net could prove useful. There have been public investigations into the murder of native women before. The most recent was British Columbia’s two-year investigation into women who disappeared around the time of the Robert Pickton pig-farm murders.

That Missing Women Commission of Inquiry was dismissed by aboriginal critics as too narrow. Bennett, it seems, is trying to avoid this particular problem.

She may, however, be in danger of doing the reverse — of making her government’s proposed inquiry too broad.

Once started, public inquiries tend to take on a life of their own. At the best of times, they can take years to complete.

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, for instance, was launched in 1991 on a wave of public goodwill. But by the time it issued its report five years later, public interest in native issues had waned.

That ennui, in turn, allowed the Liberal government of the day to safely ignore the commission’s exhaustive recommendations.

If Trudeau’s government wants its inquiry to revisit the question of which aboriginal deaths over the past 30 years were homicides and which were not, the hearings could be endless.

Yet clearly, Bennett’s comments reflect something that can’t be dismissed. In essence what she found from her forays across the country is that a great many indigenous people trust neither police nor coroners.

She recounted anecdotes which, if true, are staggering — including a Halifax case, in which a person had been shot in the back of the head, that was ruled a suicide.

Someone in officialdom should look into that allegation. Perhaps Bennett might pass her information on to Nova Scotia’s attorney general.

But if the commission of inquiry her government plans to establish is tasked with reinvestigating such cold cases, will it have time to do anything else?

Will it lose focus on it primary aim, which according to the Liberals, is to stop aboriginal women and girls from being murdered or going missing?

I put that question to New Democrat MP Charlie Angus. Angus has spent a lot of time on aboriginal issues in his Timmins riding and is the NDP’s indigenous affairs critic. His answer was careful. “It is vital we have a fully funded inquiry with the mandate to shed as much light as possible,” he wrote in an email. At the same time, he noted that “some families may never get the answers they are hoping for ...

“As a politician, I am wary of presuming to know in advance how many missing women should be on the list, or muse about what cases may merit being reopened.”

As a journalist, so am I. But I also think that the issue of missing and murdered indigenous females is not dependent on scale. Whether the number of victims is 1,200 or 4,200, there are just too many.

Thomas Walkom’s column on national affairs appears in Torstar newspapers.