On that last point, Mr. Speaker, I will just reiterate again. At the end of the day, what we really need is a national inquiry. I even said that not only is a commission required, but a judicial commission of inquiry is required.
The member properly asked what occurred during my stewardship as minister of justice and I am proud and happy to respond to that.
First, I stated throughout the time that I was minister of justice that aboriginal justice was a priority for me and it was on our justice agenda. It was also a priority at our federal, provincial, territorial annual meetings. The issue of murdered and missing aboriginal women was something I discussed then with representatives from the aboriginal community and recommended then that which I recommend now.
Second, and I do not want to take much time on this, I articulated then what I called the seven Rs of aboriginal justice, which began with recognition of aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of our country, respect for their distinctive constitutional and legal status and redress for past wrongs. I included these wrongs that needed to be redressed. I addressed the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the criminal justice system, and we forget about this. It is an astonishing statistic. Whereas aboriginal people are some 4% of the population of our country, one of every three women inmates in the country is an aboriginal woman. We have to tackle both that overrepresentation and the under-representation of aboriginal people as judges, law enforcement authorities and the like.
On that point, one of the Rs I mentioned was the need for responsiveness. We needed to be responsive to the concerns of aboriginal people, to their alarms, to their anxieties, including constitutionally responsive, so when we engaged in certain initiatives, we had to be responsive to the duty to consult, which was a constitutional duty, which we did not take into account as well. With respect to the government of which I was a part, we did not always take that duty to consult into account. Although if we look at the record during the two years that we were there, we did seek to make it a priority on the government's agenda, not just on the justice agenda, to make this the legacy issue, as former prime minister Paul Martin put it at the time for our government.