Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, provincial premiers, Aboriginal leaders, media, academics and average Canadians are debating the unending spiral of the murder of Aboriginal women.



The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimates that at least 1,017 have been killed since 1980. The count keeps rising. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall states that in his province 31 people are missing, 17 of them Aboriginal women. Fifty percent of the missing in Saskatchewan are Aboriginal women though they constitute just seven percent of the population.



Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne told provincial, territorial and Aboriginal leaders that urgent action is needed. “Whether it’s in economic development, education, living conditions … there are things we as provinces can agree need to happen in the immediate future.”



Sparking Canadians’ attention was the murder of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine whose body was discovered in a plastic bag in the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2011, her father had been beaten to death on the Sagkeeng First Nation reserve by two friends with whom he had been drinking and taking pills.



Provincial premiers, Aboriginal leaders and some academics and the media have called for a comprehensive federal inquiry into the murders and steps to prevent them. Prime Minister Harper refused, labeling the killings a crime, not a sociological issue. New Democratic Party and Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair called the killings a “national shame” and promised to immediately initiate an inquiry if his party comes into power in next year’s elections. Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau also favors an inquiry.



Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz said no one should allow the federal government to “abdicate their responsibility when it comes to the First Nations of this country.”



It is a stark situation - the Aboriginal people of Canada generally are plagued with desperation, rampant alcoholism, lack of education and skills, tottering housing, huge unemployment, grinding poverty and the total absence of hope. These generate crime that includes the murder of both women and men.



Saskatoon Police Chief Clive Weighill, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said an inquiry may shed light on the problem but that Canadians have to get tough on the issues of poor housing, poverty, racism and disadvantage otherwise it’s an “endless circle.”



As the Toronto Globe and Mail stated, Native Canadians make up only four percent of the country’s population but more than 23 percent of the federal prison population. In 2010-2011, Statistics Canada states, 41 percent of women and 25 percent of men in federal, provincial or territorial custody were Aboriginal.



A recent C.D. Howe Institute analysis declared that in 2011, 58 percent of Aboriginals living on reserves aged 20 to 24 had not completed high school, compared to 10 percent of other Canadians. Only some 25 percent of those without high school got jobs, at a low salary, compared to 80 percent of other educated Canadians who found work.



An RCMP study released this year stated that the proportion of Aboriginal women killed has grown from nine percent in 1980 to 23 percent in 2012.

The report fingered unemployment and drugs abuse as factors promoting violence in families. Aboriginal women, the study showed, were killed by an acquaintance (30 percent), spouse (29 percent) and other family members (23 percent). Eight percent of Aboriginal women were murdered by strangers.



The problem is not new. Historians have documented how force, deprivation, starvation and forced assimilation was used in the past to subjugate the Aboriginal people and how most of them were huddled into small reserves to lives of misery, poverty and disease.



This is changing. Canadian courts have ruled in favor of Aboriginal rights, the Aboriginal population is young and is pressing for fairness, and Aboriginal lands are needed for development. Future economic development in Canada would have to based on respect for the treaty rights of the Aboriginal people, protection of the environment and ensuring that the benefits of development do not exclude the people who owned the land in the first place.



The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples reinforces the rights of the Aboriginal people to their own traditional land, resources and environment protections and decrees that those rights cannot be curtailed unilaterally by ignoring the indigenous people. In his 2014 report Professor James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, pressed Canada to honor its treaties with the Aboriginal people. The government criticized his report but it cannot ignore it - or the refusal of Aboriginal youth to remain helpless.



Aboriginal people are making gains in their march to attain equality, rights and dignity in their own native land. Time is on their side. But their progress is painfully slow and the misery Aboriginals are experiencing explodes into violence killing innocent men and women alike and shaming all Canadians. That is why Canadians are clamoring to find ways to stop the murder of Aboriginal women.

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.