APTN National News
NDP MP Linda Duncan is supporting calls for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to remove Bernard Valcourt’s from his Aboriginal Affairs office.
In a release sent out late Wednesday, Duncan said she supports Treaty 8 chief’s calls for Valcourt to be removed.
“The Treaty 8 First Nations are asking for the Prime Minister to remove Valcourt from his portfolio after a March 20 meeting where Valcourt made allegations based on unreleased RCMP information about missing and murdered Aboriginal women,” said the MP for Edmonton-Strathcona and former Aboriginal Affairs critic.
Valcourt and the RCMP have been at odds since he told chiefs at the Alberta meeting recently that 70 per cent of Aboriginal women were killed by Aboriginal men. According to chiefs at the meeting, Valcourt was quoting information that was not part of the RCMP’s report released in May of last year.
A spokesperson for Valcourt’s office said the information would be released in “due course.”
The RCMP said Tuesday it will be releasing a second report on murdered and missing Indigenous women in May.
The new report, however, will not include “statistics on the ethnicity of the perpetrators of solved Aboriginal women homicides,” said an RCMP spokesperson.
Duncan asked in Question Period whether the prime minister would take “responsibility for his minister?”
Valcourt answered by saying that his meetings in Western Canada were productive.
