What Has Gone Wrong With the MMIW Inquiry? – Flare

Sep 15, 2017

An inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women was a key Liberal campaign promise. So why has it been plagued with so much controversy? Inside a new Maclean’s investigation

Last August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government delivered on a key campaign promise: to launch a formal inquiry into the 1,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. It had been a long time coming—in a 2014 interview with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper said an inquiry wasn’t “really high on [his government’s] radar,” an admission that (rightfully!) angered Canada’s Indigenous communities, who had been asking for one for years.

But the inquiry turned one on Sept. 1 and a new investigative report by Maclean’s journalists Nancy Macdonald and Meagan Campbell reveals it hasn’t exactly lived up to its promise. The most recent shock—commissioner Marilyn Poitras, a Harvard-trained law professor from the University of Saskatchewan, stepping down—was bad enough. (Poitras represented the Prairies, which have the highest rates of violence against women in the country.) But, as we learn in the Maclean’s report, the inquiry has faced challenges from the beginning.