Missing women inquiry needs management

The chaos surrounding the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women has deepened. Two more staff members — the lead commission counsel and the director of research — have quit. They join five others who have already departed — the executive director, the director of operations, the director of communications, the manager of community relations and one of the five commissioners.

Borrowing from Oscar Wilde, to lose one senior staffer may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose seven looks like carelessness.

But it’s worse than carelessness; it was entirely predictable. We’ve been down this road before.

In 1989, Brian Mulroney’s government appointed a royal commission to look into a series of issues raised by new reproductive technologies. There were ethical concerns about procedures such as in vitro fertilization, embryo transfers and the possibility of human cloning.

But the commission quickly spun apart, as it became apparent there was no consensus among its members. That wasn’t particularly surprising. They had been selected to represent the widest range of differing views.

Nevertheless, it was hoped they could put aside their personal agendas and work congenially together. Regrettably, they couldn’t.

Part of the problem was that highly vocal interest groups got involved. In itself, that was unobjectionable.

The idea of giving aggrieved parties the opportunity to vent their frustrations and lobby for change is an admirable one. Indeed it is the principal reason for appointing inquiries of this sort.

But many of these groups held entrenched positions that were either at odds with each other, or practically speaking, unrealistic. And when it became clear that some of them were going to be disappointed, they trained their guns on the commission.

That in turn created a toxic workplace. There were reports of yelling matches, abusive behaviour and more. One observer called it Frankenstein meets Kafka.

Things came to a head when four of the commissioners, among them Maureen McTeer, wife of former prime minister Joe Clark, filed lawsuits against the federal government and the commission’s chair, alleging various forms of misconduct. That forced the government’s hand, and all four were fired.

Many of the same difficulties confront the staff and members of the missing-women inquiry. Their mandate is impossibly broad. They are to investigate dozens of deaths or disappearances, “examine the systemic causes of all forms of violence against Indigenous women” and, in essence, heal the wounds of Canada’s aboriginal community.

And they must satisfy an audience that has waited decades for action, in the process building up expectations that are unlikely to be met.

Why should this be the outcome? Because the societal causes of death and despair that afflict our country’s First Nations are so deeply entangled that it will take a massive effort, stretching over many years, to make a difference.

Merely scratching the surface, which is all the commissioners have time for, will do more harm than good. Already you can sense a feeling of betrayal among Aboriginal leaders.

And as happened to the reproductive technologies commission, the inquiry members and their staff are becoming the targets of intense criticism from the very groups whose interests they were supposed to serve. I imagine that’s one reason for the high staff turnover.

Hopefully, there will be a happy ending. But a better approach would have been to collect the heads of the various federal agencies involved and demand that they come up with some concrete proposals.

You might say that’s asking the same people who presided over the problem to turn around and fix it. True.

But they have a better chance than a hopelessly overmatched commission with scant management experience and no power to enforce its findings.

Good intentions are no substitute for the hard work of shaping and driving real change. And it is the latter we urgently need.