‘ Solution’ urged for missing, dead women
OTTAWA — Canada must better understand what’s behind the alarming rate of missing and murdered aboriginal women so that a solution can be found, says the head of the commission that has probed the residential schools saga.
Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( TRC), made the comments in an interview with Postmedia News.
He also said he tried unsuccessfully to meet “several” times with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who in 2008 issued an apology in the House of Commons about residential schools.
But Sinclair said he never got his foot in the door, although he said he met on more than one occasion with Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, whom he described as a “wonderful man.”
Sinclair and two other TRC commissioners were appointed in 2009 to explore the residential schools story and are due to release their report next June.
Along the way, they have met resistance from the Conservative government, which did not want to give it complete archival records that reveal the federal role in the residential schools system dating back to the 1880s.
“I tried several times but never met him,” Sinclair said of Harper.
He said the commissioners wanted to talk to Harper about the archival documents they needed for their work and brief members of the Conservative caucus on the work of the TRC. “We wanted him to be informed about what it was that we were doing,” said Sinclair.
“It would have been opportunity for us to remind him of his very firm personal commitment to this, and that it was his apology, at a very personal level, that needed to be protected in order that reconciliation could become what I think the apology called upon it to become: a new relationship.”
He stressed that the commission is intent on finishing its report on time because it would not be right to make residential school survivors wait any longer.
Sinclair said more needs to be done to discover why indigenous women are being “victimized.”
He declined to say directly if he thinks an inquiry is needed — something that Harper has refused to do despite calls from premiers, aboriginal leaders and opposition parties.
But Sinclair said there is a connection between the violence faced by aboriginal women and the “legacy of residential schools ... social oppression and racism in society.”
“I think it’s clear that if the population of non- indigenous women were as victimized as the population of indigenous women were victimized, I think it would be an easy call to decide that we need to do something about this,” said Sinclair.
“We need to figure out why it’s happening and how to stop it. Because it will continue if we don’t come up with some solution.”
Harper, after the death of Manitoba aboriginal teenager Tina Fontaine in August, said he doesn’t think the problem is a “social phenomenon” and that such cases should be handled by police as crimes.
The government says there have been enough studies and it’s time for action.
Sinclair said that the government is not publicly providing answers to some questions on the issue, and until it is more forthcoming, people will be “spinning their wheels” over whether there should be an inquiry.
The TRC’s report is expected to reveal how the residential school system evolved and how government officials turned a blind eye.