THE INQUIRY INTO MISSING AND MURDERED WOMEN IS CALLING FOR A NATIONAL POLICE FORCE TO RE-INVESTIGATE FAMILIES’ CLAIMS. IN ITS INTERIM REPORT, IT ALSO BLAMES DELAYS ON BUREAUCRATIC RED TAPE.
INDIGENOUS WOMEN
The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women placed some of the blame for the inquiry’s slow progress squarely at the feet of the federal government, in an interim report released Wednesday.
The national inquiry began its work in September 2016, but has since been plagued by criticisms that it has moved too slowly and has failed to communicate effectively with survivors and families. Several highprofile resignations from the inquiry have made headlines in recent months.
The interim report, intended to illustrate the inquiry’s progress to date, includes a list of challenges the organization has faced. They include the federal government’s failure to give the inquiry contact information for participants in the preinquiry process, which the report claims “has left families and survivors frustrated and confused about how to become a witness.”
The report also points to “startup issues, delays, and obstacles in opening offices and hiring staff,” including an average of four months to hire new staff and up to eight months’ delay in opening offices, which often lacked proper telephone, internet and office equipment.
Indigenous organizations across the country were not given additional funding to help the inquiry connect to families, according to the report, and family liaison units that were paid for by the federal government to help families access support are still not up and running in all provinces and territories.
The report also claims the inquiry’s $53-million budget did not include funding to translate documents like the interim report into Indigenous languages, which it estimates would cost more than $30,000 per language.
What the report does not include is any recommendations based on testimony from the hearings held to date, which began in Whitehorse, Yukon in May. It attributes that in part to the fact that the software needed for “in-depth analyses of the community hearing transcripts” isn’t yet in place.
It does call for the federal government to establish a commemoration fund with Indigenous organizations, and to consider restoring the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, a non-profit that responded to the legacy of residential schools and closed in 2014.
It recommends that the federal government create a national police task force “to which the national inquiry could refer families and survivors to assess or reopen cases or review investigations.”
The report also calls for the government to “provide alternatives and options to its administrative rules,” given the national inquiry’s short time frame.
Much of the report is devoted to a detailed history of the calls for and establishment of the national inquiry, a description of the inquiry’s mandate, and an overview of previous research into violence against Indigenous women.