Murdered aboriginal women: What to know about a national public inquiry – CBC
Calls for a public inquiry have gained steam – but what would it look like, and are there alternatives?
A public inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women is vital, if you ask provincial and territorial leaders, opposition parties and aboriginal groups. The federal government, however, suggests it’s a misguided approach.
With so much debate about a public inquiry, here’s a closer look at how one could work and what it could reasonably hope to achieve.
What would an inquiry look like?
The goal of a public inquiry should be to identify the factors causing these deaths and disappearances, so that they can be addressed, argues the Native Women’s Association of Canada.
In order to do that, as many as possible of the more than 1,000 documented cases of murdered and missing aboriginal women from the last 30 years should be explored, said Dawn Harvard, vice-president for the NWAC.
“In an ideal world I would say we should talk to all of the families, we should look at all of those women, because every one of those women was important and it was a tragic loss,” she said. Families of the missing, police, child welfare authorities and others could all be called as potential witnesses, she said. Topics like sexism, racism and poverty would all be relevant to the discussion.
Harvard wasn’t prepared to comment on limits for how long the inquiry should take or how broad a time frame it might examine, saying that would still have to be discussed.
