MMIW inquiry just got worse
Back in June, the debate over whether Indigenous Canadian women are victims of genocide drowned out many concerns and criticisms that had been levelled against the inquiry that concluded they are. Those came not least from the families of victims, who alleged a lack of empathy compounded by endless staff turnover, a glacial pace of evidence-gathering and a lack of transparency. This week CBC reported the inquiry also made some very basic factual errors.
The final report alleges “Indigenous women and girls now make up almost 25 per cent of homicide victims,” when of course it’s 25 per cent of female homicide victims. In her preface, commissioner Michèle Audette claims “statistics show … Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada.” Statistics Canada pegs it at around 2.7 times more likely.
“We were on the ground, we were with the families,” Audette explained. “Sometimes we were able to see that numbers don’t connect to the reality on the ground.”
This validated widespread concerns that the inquiry was disastrously uninterested in collecting actual data about victims, perpetrators and circumstances, but it gets worse: Corrections made to the report in light of CBC’S inquiries are not annotated, nor have they been included in all versions — including the official one filed with the government.
Some are understandably worried the inquiry’s useful findings might be overshadowed by such blunders. But if anything I think it could be a useful reminder, because the discussion following the report’s release came nowhere near running its course. At one point, amid much waffling, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau literally copped to Canada committing genocide under his watch: “We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”
And then … nothing. We are about to have an election campaign in which a head of government has admitted at the very least to failing to prevent genocide — itself a breach of international law, putting Trudeau’s Canada in the same league as Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. A lot of perfectly mainstream jurists and commentators said they agreed with this. And now, bupkes.
I suspect a lot of people who claim to support the inquiry’s findings are rolling their eyes at this point. It’s not, you know, GENO-CIDE-genocide. Justin Trudeau’s not going to wind up in The Hague, for heaven’s sake.
All I can say is read the report. Its legal analysis concedes “there is little precedent in international law for situations where the state is the perpetrator of genocide through structural violence, such as colonialism,” but it very much implicates Canada in GENOCIDE-geno-cide, “in breach of (its) international obligations, triggering its responsibility under international law.”
Few commentators seemed to have read that part. After the report’s release, some asked why Indigenous people shouldn’t be allowed to define the terms of their own terrible mistreatment — but the report is concerned specifically with the UN Convention. Others found themselves defending historical events as genocide or “cultural genocide,” which is a much easier case to make — just not the report’s case. Nearly everyone — including, you will note above, the authors of the report’s legal analysis — found themselves supporting the charge of genocide against Indigenous people, rather than against women.
They found themselves doing all that because the inquiry’s case for an ongoing genocide against Indigenous people in general, and Indigenous women specifically, was a hopelessly dodgy, ill-advised distraction. Even if you can accept that when Indigenous men murder Indigenous women they do so as unwitting agents of genocidal Canadian colonialism, Indigenous men are murdered roughly three times more often than Indigenous women.
Most ridiculous were the folks who ostensibly supported the report’s findings but accused skeptics of getting too hung up on the genocide thing. “Let’s not obsess about who did what to whom in Srebrenica,” nobody ever said. “It’s no big deal whether Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic calls it ‘genocide’ or ‘a crime,’” nobody added in 2013 when Nikolic apologized only for the latter. Just because you’re accusing a person or entity of a novel kind of genocide doesn’t mean you aren’t accusing them of something that needs answering for. It’s a big word for a reason.
The fact Trudeau was able to shrug the accusation away may well be evidence of Canadians’ apathy or antipathy toward Indigenous people. But it is certainly evidence that the inquiry swung for the fences and whiffed. There is indeed lots else in the report about how to prevent Indigenous women from going missing and being murdered, but it’s nothing we didn’t know before: Better housing, education and health, more job opportunities, higher incomes and happier lives lead to all the better outcomes we’re after.
That progress has been in many cases so slow is a national shame, and normally I would say we can’t be reminded of that often enough. But this hopelessly misbegotten, mismanaged and incurious inquiry may well have made things worse.