Feds get failing grade on MMIWG
Advocacy group finds little done to address inquiry’s calls for justice
OTTAWA—It was Sonya Nadine Mae Cywink’s 31st birthday when she went missing in Ontario in mid-August of 1994.
She was with child.
She had been planning to celebrate her birthday by meeting her sister, Meggie Cywink, at a Toronto Blue Jays game. But she never showed up.
Eleven days later, her body was found at the Southwold Earthworks National Historical Site, south of London, Ont., wearing only a T-shirt and socks. Her cause of death was described as blunt force trauma.
“Obviously, my grief, and the anxiety of never knowing what happened in the final moments of Sonya’s life have haunted me,” Cywink said Wednesday.
She expressed her disappointment that the massive threeyear effort of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has not led to change.
“Families, communities, and allies have not received any information about what governments — either federal or provincial — have been doing over the past year on this file,” she said.
“I can tell you that, whatever it is, it has had little or no impact on the families left behind,” Cywink said.
“It has brought us no solace and it has not changed the violence we witness or the genocide we survive.”
The inquiry delivered its final report June 3, 2019, concluding that decades of systemic racism and human rights violations had contributed to the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of Indigenous women and girls and that it constituted a genocide.
In a report card released Wednesday to mark the anniversary of the final report’s release, the Native Women’s Association of Canada found little has been done to address the inquiry’s 231 calls for justice in the last 12 months. It awarded the federal government a “resounding fail” in the four broad categories of human rights under which the inquiry made recommendations: health, security, culture and justice.
“Instead of a national action plan, we are left with a lack-of-action plan,” association president Lorraine Whitman said.
“The sad fact is, we cannot afford to do nothing in the face of the violence that continues to take the lives of First Nations, Métis and Inuit women.”
Last week, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett said Ottawa is delaying its intended release of the national action plan this month because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whitman said using the pandemic as an excuse for not delivering a plan is a “double slap in the face” to Indigenous women who are facing even greater risks of violence because of isolation measures aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“These are things we have been trying to tell the government, but they have not been doing much listening,” Whitman said.
On Wednesday, Bennett acknowledged these concerns, but also said a national action plan is not just up to Ottawa to craft. It must also involve commitments and reforms within provinces and territories — something that was highlighted in the inquiry’s final report.
“Some people think that this was a federal inquiry. It was the first-ever national public inquiry so it requires that kind of intergovernmental work that is never easy, shall we say,” Bennett said in an interview Wednesday.
“The commission report insisted (the response) be regionally relevant. We will work with them provinces and territories in order to get the best possible national action plan we can.”
In a joint statement Wednesday, the national inquiry’s four commissioners said they “deplore inaction on the part of some governments.”
“As the final report asserts, the calls for justice are not mere recommendations or a quaint list of best practices — they are legal imperatives rooted in Canada’s obligations under international and domestic human rights norms and laws,” the commissioners said.