APTN National News
Wednesday saw just about everyone push the Harper government for an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
NDP leader Tom Mulcair was first out of the gate.
Mulcair said his party will call a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women within 100 days in power.
Mulcair made the vow Wednesday morning in Ottawa. His team fired off a press release as he was speaking.
“Enough is enough. (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper has made it clear he has no intention of doing the right thing,” said Mulcair in his statement. “But I can promise that if the NDP forms government in 2015 we will launch an investigation into murdered and missing Indigenous women.”
Harper has refused to call an inquiry.
He recently answered a question from APTN’s Shirley McLean by saying each case should be handled as a crime, not a “sociological phenomenon.”
Liberal MP Stephane Dion immediately followed Mulcair’s press conference with one of his own. Dion didn’t promise an inquiry and said an election shouldn’t be needed to force one.
“It’s clearly needed,” said Dion. “It’s 2014 and we see that the problem is not solved. The difficulties are still occurring. We need to save lives for the future and to use all the tools that we may have to save lives and one of them is a public inquiry.”
There was no press release from the Liberals but leader Justin Trudeau tweeted Harper was on the wrong side of history and repeated his party’s support for an inquiry.
About a year ago the provincial premiers called on the government to call an inquiry. They’re meeting in Charlottetown, P.E.I.
They renewed their call in the afternoon but also issued a possible compromise – a round table of discussions with leaders and invited Harper.
In May, an RCMP report revealed nearly 1,200 Indigenous women and girls had been murdered between 1982 and 2012. The report found Indigenous women are five times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women.
The Green party was not to be left out of the mix.
“The violence faced by Aboriginal women and girls in this country is our shared national disgrace,” said Green leader Elizabeth May in a statement.
Then just before 4 p.m. the Harper government issued a statement of its own from Justice Minister Peter MacKay.
MacKay began with offering condolences to the family of Tina Fontaine, the 15-year old Aboriginal girl murdered in Winnipeg a couple weeks ago. Her body was pulled from a Winnipeg river wrapped in black plastic.
“Now is the time to take action, not continue to study the issue,” said MacKay, pointing to his party’s taking point of 40 studies that have allegedly already been completed, each looking into the missing and murdered Indigenous women.
APTN previously reported that’s not exactly the case. That story, along with a list of the studies, can be found here.
Many of the organizations named by the Tories were outraged to learn their studies were used to reject an inquiry.
A review of the studies found just a handful dealt directly with missing and murdered Indigenous women, while some of the organizations no longer exist due to funding cuts.
