I don't often agree with smug Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, but I am on board with one of his recent columns. He was talking about the AFN's constant demands for a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Any inquiry would be futile and solve nothing, says Simpson. He's right, of course. Native women's groups are also demanding answers to the obvious:
100% of solved native homicides were committed by people living with the victim, or in the same close circle. This compares with 93% of non-native murder victims.* In other obvious words, murdered and assaulted women the world over knew their attackers.
In the case of natives, the root causes are economic, sociological, political, attitudinal and institutional -- way too vast for the scope of an inquiry. Inquiries work for specific issues, such as what happened to the drinking water in southern Ontario a few years ago. They don't for vast, general issues. And by the way, we just had a six-year, multi-million dollar inquiry into residential schools wrap up which chronicled nothing but hundreds of sad, personal stories about what happened to a lot of people. Bottom line? Nothing will come of it, believe me.
Simpson says that AFN Chief Perry Bellegarde wants "action". No question action is needed, but no where does Bellegarde call for action among his own chiefs, who have to start looking within their own communities, face their violent problems and do something about them. Other than yet another national roundtable (code for "let's talk and do nothing"), Bellegarde is once again demanding "the government" handle it.
It's disgraceful.
_________________________________________
*2014 RCMP data
No comments:
Post a Comment