The Star’s view: We must see results that won’t gather dust on a shelf,

Two years ago this month, the body of a petite and pretty 15-yearold girl, Tina Fontaine, was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in Winnipeg’s Red River.

Her shocking murder might have been ignored in the rest of the country, just one in the RCMP’s tally of more than 1,181 killings and disappearances of aboriginal girls and women since 1980. Yet somehow her tragic death acted as a catalyst, producing a drum beat of demands from across Canada for an inquiry into Canada’s national shame of murdered and missing aboriginal women and girls.

On Wednesday,10 months after Justin Trudeau’s government was sworn in, Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett finally announced the long-overdue inquiry. Now its five commissioners must deliver on a daunting mandate to discover the systemic issues that contribute to violence against aboriginal girls and women, from policing, welfare and child care practices and government policies to social and economic conditions. And unlike the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which ran two years over its official five-year mandate, they must do so in a timelier manner.

So far, it’s promising. The five commissioners, led by the first female First Nations judge appointed in British Columbia, Judge Marion Buller, are all well-respected. And the inquiry has been well-funded at $53.8 million, almost $14 million more than was originally promised.

Perhaps most importantly to keeping the inquiry on track, commission members must deliver an interim report in a year, and wrap up their hearings in just over two, by Dec. 31, 2018.

Nor will the commissioners have to wrangle with witnesses or other jurisdictions to get co-operation. They have been given the power to compel witnesses, including police officers, to testify. And all the provinces and territories have pledged to co-operate.

Though the commissioners cannot order that cold cases be reopened — something criticized by the Native Women’s Association of Canada and other groups — it can refer them back to police forces for further investigation. That is something that would be difficult for any officers to ignore.

In short, the commission holds the promise of finally getting to the bottom of a shameful page in Canada’s history — if it stays on track.

That won’t be easy. Already the three ministers responsible for establishing the inquiry have heard from 2,100 participants and received 4,100 online submissions.

And delivering recommendations that will effectively address the issue will not be easy. Indeed, if investigations and words were enough to solve Canada’s problem of murdered and missing aboriginal women, the work of a national inquiry would have been completed by now.

It started in 2004 with Amnesty International’s door-thumper of a report on the tragedy, Stolen Sisters, that found “Canadian authorities have failed in their responsibility to protect the rights of indigenous women in Canada.” Then in 2012, British Columbia issued its reports of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. That year, too, the Native Women’s Association of Canada released its Sisters in Spirit study on the issue, followed by a United Nations report in 2015.

What’s clear from all the reports and studies is that there is a systemic problem that must be solved: 16 per cent of all women murdered in Canada between 1980 and 2012 were indigenous, although only 4 per cent of Canadian women are.

The inquiry promises to shine a spotlight on this national shame and build a new relationship with Canada’s aboriginal women. But promises and words are not enough. We must see results so timely and compelling that they won’t gather dust on a shelf.

Investigation into murdered and missing indigenous women promises to shine a spotlight on this national shame