Madam Chair, it is an honour to stand here on the lands of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. To them I say meegwetch.
I am moved to say the power of the red dress symbol has been overwhelming. One moment that indicates the power of the red dresses hanging empty of the women's bodies who should be living and walking with us was the RCMP's reaction to the Fairy Creek encampment of largely indigenous land protectors and forest defenders. In a certain part of the Fairy Creek protest area they had hung red dresses everywhere. The violence with which the RCMP made sure they tore down all the red dresses and threw them away was indicative of some of the larger problems I think we face in terms of the culture of violence and racism.
The report of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, two-spirit plus inquiry made it very clear that when they looked at the culture within law enforcement, it was largely defined by colonialism, racism, bias and discrimination. There are many important recommendations in the inquiry that we have had now for so many years, and so many recommendations have not been implemented. I think of the recommendation that if we want to stop a genocide of indigenous women and girls, we need a guaranteed livable income to ensure that no one lives in poverty.
It is pretty obvious that indigenous women and girls are going missing because the only way to get anywhere is to hitchhike. They are vulnerable and not safe as there is no public transport. What are they to do? The inquiry called for safe and reliable public transportation, particularly in our remote and rural areas. It also called for an end to man camps, the resource exploitation camps. Obviously, it is not universal and it is not all the men who work there, but many times there is a direct correlation between the man camps that build pipelines and dams and the exploitation and killing of women.
In the report after re-reading it in light of tonight's debate on Red Dress Day, we become very aware of a tone of voice, a framing, a verb tensing throughout the report, which is really about trying to find justice for the women who have disappeared, trying to solve the cases for the women who have been killed, to look at systemic changes throughout society. There are over 50 pages of calls for justice and very important recommendations, but the tone of voice and the tensing is around finding out what happened to women and girls who have been gone a long time. It does not speak to the urgency of how we stop this genocide.
The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre has said frequently in this place that she is at ground zero for the assault on women and girls, but we also know that sometimes indigenous women and girls are killed and we know who killed them. Chantel Moore was killed on June 4, 2020, by a member of the Edmundston police force. We know his name. We just do not know why he chose to kill Chantel Moore. We have a police culture problem. We have an urgent need to make sure the police, when an indigenous woman or girl goes missing, respond the same way they would as if it were their own sister, daughter, mother or wife who had gone missing.
That does mean that we change our verb tense. That means we stop looking back at things that have happened and find ways to try to make them right, that we provide the services for women who have been assaulted. Many recommendations in the report go to that, but nowhere in the inquiry for murdered and missing indigenous women and girls do we find anything as immediate and proactive and life-saving as saying we need a red dress alert. We need people's phones to go off. We need people to go out and look, just as we do on an Amber Alert for a missing child. We need to actually take the steps that are required for one of our dear, dear friends; mothers, daughters, aunties, sisters.
Every indigenous woman I know has lost someone close to her. It must stop.