Mr. Speaker, this week we are thinking of the families of murdered and missing indigenous women as the inquiry finally begins its first week of hearing testimony. I hope it is going as well for them as possible now that they are finally being heard. Getting at the cause of thousands of murdered and missing indigenous women is crucial to our country, but almost a year after the inquiry's launch, families are still feeling left out and now concern and frustration is growing, as articulated by the families.
We have this one week of hearings, but then things will be suspended until the fall. It is time for the government to own up to its mistakes and to remedy them. The commissioners and the government cannot continue on the path they have taken so far. Is appropriate funding fully available to the commissioners and is the government doing everything it can to support the families of murdered and missing indigenous women?
Many times we have heard government members on the other side say, and I quite agree with them, that they are committed to concurrent implementation, that we do not need to wait until the end of the inquiry to take action on the things we already know as a country we need to do to make women safe and bring justice to indigenous families.
Here is one set of directions New Democrats would have hoped the government would have taken already.
Ten years ago, Cindy Blackstock filed a human rights complaint about discrimination against first nations children. Since then, the government has not taken action, despite a court order and three non-compliance orders. The federal government is guilty of racially discriminating against 163,000 first nations children, says the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. An investment of $155 million is all that the government needed to end this discrimination. It was not found in last month's budget and last week's Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling said that two teenage suicides in the Wapekeka First Nation reserve might be blamed on the federal failure to implement Jordan's principle and comply with the now four Canadian Human Rights Tribunal orders.
Following the budget tabled for 2017, Cindy Blackstock said:
There’s nothing new in the budget for First Nations children and their families, in child welfare, or their implementation of the Jordan’s Principle...even though they’ve been found out of compliance with legal orders to stop that inequality.
It’s a moral issue: is Canada so broke that the finance minister and the Prime Minister have made a deliberate choice to discriminate against little kids?
That was said by Cindy Blackstock with the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society.
A second large area of action that I would have thought the government would have moved forward on already is domestic violence shelter funding for indigenous women. Only five additional shelters on reserve have been funded. That has been loudly identified as inadequate and Inuit leaders, the Pauktuutit Inuit women's association in particular, says 70% of Inuit communities have no access to any violence against women shelters and there was nothing in the budget for them at all.
When will the government finally act to make indigenous women safer and rebuild the trust that this country needs so much?