Osgoode Hall hosts event to shed light on issues surrounding the inquiry
At a discussion in Osgoode Hall December 3 about a provincial inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, two British Columbia lawyers said the inquiry wouldn’t achieve anything notable.
Speakers at the event entitled “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada: Learning from the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry,” said the inquiry failed to establish a resolution regarding the prevention of crime against aboriginal women.
David Eby, executive director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, an organization which aims to protect the human rights and freedoms of people in Canada, says this inquiry failed because the women who were meant to be represented didn’t have adequate legal resources to defend themselves.
The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry was organized for two main purposes.
Firstly, it was to provide female survivors of sexual assaults and abductions with a chance to tell their stories, and to investigate what happened to the deceased women so a public hearing could be organized to highlight the injustice, explains Eby. The second purpose was to build strategies to prevent similar tragedies.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t provide either of those functions,” says Eby.
According to a 2009 Statistics Canada report, “Aboriginal women are three times more likely to experience violent victimization than non-Aboriginal women.”
Eby says Aboriginal women are more likely to be murdered or abducted, especially in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a crime hot spot, yet BC’s police force has made little progress on the issue.
Most of the crimes against Aboriginal women go unsolved, and the problem has worsened over the last several decades, Eby says.
“We found this absolutely appalling, and it forced us to investigate why Aboriginal women are more likely to be victims of [murder or abduction], and what can be done to stop it,” says Avnish Nanda, student of Osgoode Hall Law School and organizer of the event.
The BCCLA decided to get involved to ensure that policing services were available to Aboriginal women without discrimination and that police were doing enough to protect the safety of Aboriginal women, sex workers in particular, according to Eby.
During the inquiry, says Eby, the Aboriginal women were forced to represent themselves, while the Vancouver police had 25 lawyers to represent them.
“These women, who have active addictions […] or mental health issues, were against some of Canada’s best lawyers,” says Eby.
Eby also argues the inquiry didn’t answer the question of why these women were being killed and what made them particularly vulnerable.
The second speaker of the event, Robyn Gervais, was appointed as independent counsel representing the interests of the Aboriginal women at the inquiry into serial killer Robert Pickton’s case. Pickton had targeted a number of Aboriginal women, the Canadian Press reported.
Gervais resigned from her position after six months.
“I withdrew because I felt that I couldn’t do my job,” says Gervais, adding that she felt, given the odds stacked against the Aboriginal women from the beginning, her contributions to the inquiry would be void.
Amongst several problems with the inquiry, Gervais identifies “the lack of funding for Aboriginal organizations, and the imbalance between the police witnesses and other witnesses in the room.”
“There were not community witnesses but a lot of police witnesses,” she says.
Moving forward, Eby and Gervais say there needs to be a national inquiry to address this issue.
“This is a national issue so it’s not just the Highway of Tears,” says Eby, referring to British Columbia Provincial Highway 16, the site of many unsolved murders and disappearances.
Nanda says bringing a discussion of this inquiry to York, and particularly Osgoode, is important because there are staff who have experience in dealing with Aboriginal issues.
He calls for a national inquiry on these issues. “We must listen to victims families and the community in order to understand what’s really going on.”
By Alex Hum, Features Editor
