Will Carney’s Government Act on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Report?

Nearly six years after the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report, including 231 calls for justice, the safety of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in Canada has not substantially improved, experts say.

“Indigenous women are not safer,” Josie Nepinak, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, told The Tyee. “Since the inquiry report was released, there continues to be multiple systemic barriers and those barriers have not decreased.”

Nepinak said the association hopes to meet with Prime Minister Mark Carney to discuss the Liberal party’s election promise to move forward on the calls for justice.

Indigenous rights and reconciliation took a back seat in the recent federal election as attention shifted to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada.

While the two front-runners, Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, talked about reconciliation in economic terms, the Liberal platform made broader promises, including to “move forward on the implementation of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Calls for Justice and the National Action Plan.”

The national inquiry’s final report, “Reclaiming Power and Place,” which was released on June 3, 2019, described a genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people, a result of violence “empowered by colonial structures.”

Almost six years later, Nepinak said groups advocating for Indigenous women have seen “very little progress” on its recommendations.

“We are in an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women across this country,” Nepinak said. “Now is the time for action. We have a new government. We have a government that has stated, yes, they will implement the calls.”

She said long-term systemic changes are urgently needed to address the crisis, including better housing, education, employment, community safety and transportation. While she acknowledged the federal government’s recent funding for emergency shelters across Canada, Indigenous women need to be safe in their home environment, she said.

That will require “a more meaningful conversation” with families and service providers, as well as systemic solutions, Nepinak added.

“We need the police at the table. We need health-care providers and we need justice people at the table,” she said. “We can’t do this alone. We need allies. We need folks who understand the issues to work with us in a better way, because Indigenous women's lives matter.”

Just two calls for justice fully implemented

Last June, the Assembly of First Nations released a progress report that found implementation of the calls for justice is “far from complete.”

The report concluded that only two calls for justice had been fully implemented five years after the report’s release. The majority had shown “minimal or no progress,” it added. It called for more resources to fully implement the remaining calls for justice.

“Critical areas such as policing and corrections require urgent reforms,” Grand Chief Connie Big Eagle, chair of the Assembly of First Nations Women’s Council, said in a statement. She cited a March 2024 federal auditor general’s report that criticized Public Safety Canada’s management of the First Nations and Inuit Policing Program.

The findings mirror the federal government’s own tracking, which shows that just two of the 220 calls for justice involving the federal government have been fully implemented. Of the remaining calls for justice, about half are “in progress” while the other half are “pending.”

The two calls for justice that have been fully implemented both relate to corrections.

They include adding an Indigenous-specific provision to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the appointment of a deputy commissioner for Indigenous corrections, something the federal government announced two years ago.

The Assembly of First Nations’ progress report found that there had been “moderate progress” to support justice reform in Canada, including the development of a federal Indigenous justice strategy, which was announced in March, and funding to support its implementation.

Kory Wilson is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw and holds the traditional name Hemas Kla-Lee-Lee-Kla. She is also chair of the BC First Nations Justice Council, one of the 38 Indigenous groups involved in developing the recently released federal Indigenous justice strategy.

She called for a holistic approach that would keep Indigenous people out of the justice system, which she said would benefit both government budgets and society generally.

But she said the work “is not going to happen overnight.”

“It’s going to take sustainable, systemic, long-term work,” Wilson said. “All of these things will cost money, but in the end, they will save money.”

‘Deliberate race, identity and gender-based genocide’

Marion Buller was chief commissioner for the national inquiry. Over several years, she heard more than 1,000 hours of testimony from 2,380 witnesses, many of them survivors of violence and family members of missing and murdered women.

In the inquiry’s final report, Buller described a “deliberate race, identity and gender-based genocide.”

She believes that’s still true.

“Absolutely,” Buller told The Tyee. “The more that activists and academics are researching and finding out what really happened in Canada, it’s just adding more strength to the conclusion... of historical and continuing genocide.”

Buller is a member of the Mistawasis Nêhiyawak, a Cree First Nation in Saskatchewan, and today works as a lawyer and legal Elder with law firm Miller Titerle + Co. Her recollection from the hearings is “the tremendous strength and resilience of Indigenous people across Canada.”

“With all of the actions of colonial governments over the years, when you think about it, it's amazing that Indigenous people are still here,” she said. “I think that this is a credit to the strength and resilience and sheer brilliance of Indigenous people.”

Six years later, she believes there’s been a shift in the Canadian public’s understanding of Indigenous history. “For a lot of Canadian citizens, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, we’ve had a wake-up call,” she said.

While governments may be slow to keep up, Buller said she’d prefer to see meaningful change over speed. She called for decolonization that works with Indigenous people as equal partners rather than a “patriarchal, paternalistic approach to programming for Indigenous people.”

“That’s last century,” she said. “There has to be a paradigm shift away from this colonial, patriarchal, patronizing approach to decolonizing, towards equal partnership.”

Heidi Matthews, a law professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, studies the concept of genocide, particularly as it applies to Indigenous Peoples in Canada. She said a first step for the new government, and Carney in particular, should be a clear statement acknowledging Canada’s role in the violence against Indigenous people.

“They need to be specific about how they understand responsibility for the genocide and, correlatedly, how they understand accountability for the genocide,” she said.

How the next government can move forward

Experts The Tyee spoke with pointed to several items the new government could move forward on to implement the calls for justice.

Matthews said it starts with human rights.

Acknowledge human rights: The calls for justice ask Canada to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women — something the federal government has not yet done. Matthews said making this move would be an “important place to start” with implications for human rights protections more broadly.

Establish a national Indigenous human rights tribunal and ombudsperson: The national inquiry called for a tribunal and an ombudsperson that would be independent of government and have authority to receive complaints from Indigenous people and communities, as well as conduct investigations. While Canada has taken steps to establish a national Indigenous and human rights ombudsperson, it’s not clear when the position will be filled.

“Those could have been done by now,” Buller said.

Create a national database: The national inquiry called on Canada to “amend data collection and intake screening processes to gather distinctions-based and intersectional data about Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.” But that has never happened.

In November, the federal government said that “the collection of national data on the Indigenous identity of those in contact with the criminal justice system has improved over time” but added that “there continues to be limited data with respect to distinctions-based breakdowns.”

It means that no one really knows the complete picture about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Nepinak said, making it difficult “to understand and to analyze the issues.”

Address the over-incarceration of Indigenous women and girls: The national inquiry called for justice reforms like community-based, Indigenous-specific options for sentencing and changing Indigenous policing from “a mere delegation to an exercise in self-governance and self-determination over policing.” But meaningful change has not occurred. In B.C., attempts to reform the Police Act appear to have stalled.

Provide sufficient resources: The Assembly of First Nations’ progress report identified an “urgent need for increased resources” to fully implement the 231 calls for justice. Similarly, Nepinak said the federal government must “resource Indigenous women's organizations to be able to do this work,” while also sufficiently funding initiatives pushing for systemic change.

With the election over, Matthews expressed hope that Carney might feel freer to discuss the harms against Indigenous people and take steps to move forward with implementing the calls for justice.

“These calls are not just about improving the condition of life for Indigenous Peoples, but actually would have impacts that benefit everybody living in so-called Canada,” Matthews said. “The calls for justice are basically a blueprint for a reparations framework, which has only been very partially implemented.”