Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.The difficult issue of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) has been the subject of hundreds of reports going back decades.While the statistical figures in these studies can only be criticized as likely underestimating the number of MMIWG, the same cannot be said about the way that they’ve been categorized or explained. The National Inquiry into MMIWG Final Report (“Reclaiming Power and Place,” 2019) is the most comprehensive of these studies, its two volumes based on testimony from over 2,380 people. Still, it deserves a failing grade for claiming there currently exists in Canada “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … empowered by colonial structures … leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”.SLOBODIAN: No, I won’t mourn violent ICE agitators and I won’t apologize for it.In the report’s opening, the inquiry’s chief commissioner Marion Buller, an ex-BC Provincial Court judge, argued that its contents were about “deliberate race, identity, and gender-based genocide.” Buller declared that “The violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQIA people is a national tragedy of epic proportions.”The Final Report declares that its “genocide” charge, which occurs no fewer than 72 times in the first volume alone, is in keeping with the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.Nothing could be further from the truth, as I’ve argued elsewhere..None of the murders of these indigenous Canadian women was aimed at destroying them as an ethnic, racial, or other grouping; lots of random murders — the nearly universal shared feature of the killing of indigenous women and girls — however heart-breaking and outrageous they may be, do not add up to a genocide; the annual uncoordinated and serendipitous indigenous female murder rate of 5 per 100,000 hardly qualifies as a genocide; and rather than being an inter-group form of violence, as the UN Convention requires, the evidence shows that the murder of Aboriginal females is largely confined to the indigenous community itself.More particularly, rather than being an inter-group form of violence, an essential UN Convention criterion, several studies show that the murder of Aboriginal females is largely confined to the indigenous community itself. RCMP statistics, for example, reveal that 70%-90% of murders are committed by indigenous men who knew their victims.In sum, sloppy, politically motivated reasoning underlies the MMIWG Final Report’s genocide accusation..WAGNER: ‘The land of my birth has vanished’ — what the Liberals did to Canada.This does not deny that every murder is an outrage, and the murder and disappearance of some 1,200 indigenous women and children is undeniably a tragedy. Sadly, however, it is shared with non-Aboriginals suffering from similar domestic pathologies, including broken homes, negligent parenting, family trauma, physical and emotional abuse, substance addiction, joblessness, and the hopelessness of intergenerational welfare dependence.On January 23, the latest MMIWG study was released by the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto. It monotonously updates and confirms the MMIWG report’s findings. It also introduces an additional aspect not studied before, namely the differing ethno-racial treatment of indigenous and non-indigenous murder cases.The IJB reviewed 1,329 cases in which women and girls were killed or died under suspicious circumstances in Canada between 2019 and 2025. .Like the 2019 MMIWG report, the IJB study showed that indigenous women and girls are killed at rates six times higher than non-indigenous women.Almost all — 97% — of female indigenous victims in the IJB’s database whose outcomes were known were killed by someone they knew, as the MMIWG report also found.But unlike the MMIWG investigation, the IJB study focused on the fact that the perpetrators are frequently convicted of lesser offences than those guilty in the deaths of non-indigenous victims, an understandable observation to anyone following changes in indigenous criminal sentencing in recent years..BURTON: Alberta’s independence question is no longer hypothetical — Canada needs to pay attention.For instance, the most serious charge in Canada’s justice system is first-degree murder, carrying a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Only 25% of those accused in the deaths of indigenous women and girls faced that charge. In cases with non-indigenous female victims, first-degree murder charges were laid 37% of the time.It also showed that when an indigenous woman is killed, 64% of cases end with a plea bargain, compared to 57% in cases with a non-indigenous victim. Moreover, seventy-six of the indigenous cases that were resolved in court — or 46% — ended with a finding of manslaughter, which criminal lawyers say is characterized by a lack of intent to kill. Manslaughter was the single most common sentencing outcome in the homicides of indigenous females..In contrast, of the 384 concluded cases involving non-indigenous victims, only 24% ended with a manslaughter outcome. The most common finding was second-degree murder, the outcome in 137 — or 36% — of these cases.The numbers appear to show differences in how indigenous and non-indigenous cases are dealt with, said Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal defence lawyer for 20 years.“When you look systemically … [Indigenous women’s] lives and their health and their safety are not valued as highly,” he says.“It is something that should cause further inquiry.”.OLDCORN: Floor crossing to Liberals isn’t about one MP — it’s about breaking Pierre Poilievre.Surely, Spratt was aware that all these disparities were the result of the employment of ethno-racial Gladue principles in sentencing indigenous defendants, compounded by related judicial leniency rooted in the soft bigotry of low indigenous male expectation.Gladue principles are a near-unique Canadian legal framework, rooted in the Supreme Court case R. v. Gladue (1999) which requires judges to consider the unique systemic and background factors of indigenous offenders when sentencing them to prison. Their aim is to reverse overrepresentation in prisons by looking at colonization’s alleged impacts like inherited trauma, racism, cultural loss, and abuse. The principles do so by exploring community-based, restorative justice alternatives to jail. These principles emphasize restorative, culturally sensitive solutions, such as healing circles, rather than punitive ones, by examining factors that lead to contact with the law..But they ignore the elementary fact that many of these factors, including household abuse, poverty, unemployment, and low education levels, are shared with non-indigenous people, including millions of immigrants from non-European countries.In short, they are discriminatory race- and ethnicity-based principles that reward guilty people while further punishing their victims by trivializing their genuine victimization..Legal experts also claim that the reasons behind the numerical discrepancies between indigenous and non-indigenous murder sentencing are complex.In remote areas, including reserves, restraining orders are often ineffective in keeping perpetrators away from victims, says lawyer and activist Marion Buller. Because of this, indigenous women and girls face unique challenges to protect themselves from fatal violence, she claims. For many, access to resources and shelters is limited or nonexistent, while the stigma of speaking up is profound..BONDY: Carney’s China gamble — trade diversification is smart — a ‘strategic partnership’ is not.While this may be superficially correct, Buller and others refuse to ask why so many indigenous people still choose to live dysfunctional lives on remote, lawless, corrupt, and poverty-stricken Indian Reserves while so many of their peers have fled to urban centres.Buller also claims the IJB’s findings reflect “important systemic problems” that impact the outcomes of cases involving female indigenous victims, “If police don’t see the life as being as important … how does that affect how they collect the evidence that goes before the prosecutor?” .Along with colonialism, Buller also cited “the widespread denial of rights and dehumanization of Indigenous women” as the root causes of the murder of indigenous women in her 2019 study.Lost in an argument that places all the blame on extrinsic factors is the high probability that the lives of these murdered indigenous women are seen as unimportant by their almost exclusively indigenous male killers, a devaluation that long preceded European colonization, especially in the mainly patrilineal societies that existed at the time. For example, discriminatory gender rights were pervasive in Inuit societies and even included wife sharing.The two reports discussed here have much in common, not only because their statistical evidence is very similar but because their explanatory narratives are incomplete, skewed, erroneous, and biased..STIRLING: A tale of two Vaclavs, ‘climate cartel’ Carney vs trade deal Trump.The result is that IJB’s report could easily have translated the MMIWG claim that there exists, “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … empowered by colonial structures … leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations” into the following statement: “The numerical discrepancies in the punishment of Indigenous males who murder Indigenous females reflect a gender-based genocide empowered by colonial structures leading directly to the current differentially high rates of violence, death, and suicide among Indigenous women compared to non-Indigenous ones.”Had the IJB’s report done so, it would never have mentioned that these and other adversities like hunger, starvation, high infant mortality rates, and low life expectancy were ever-present among indigenous people during the 12,000-year pre-colonial period..Ironically, blaming colonial and post-colonial policies for the murdered and missing females, and elevating the phenomenon into “genocide,” is also wrong-headed because, by and large, indigenous activists have fought to strengthen or refine most of the traditional colonial and post-colonial features of their relationship with the Crown.What this means is that the differential distribution between indigenous and non-indigenous female murder victims (and their perpetrators) would have long disappeared save for the special ethno-racial treatment of indigenous people not only by the criminal justice system where Gladue sentencing principles and woke judges rule supreme, but also because of the special treatment of indigenous Canadians in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the treaties signed by indigenous leaders with Britain and Canada which created separate land reserves (now speciously called First Nations) and exclusive rights for Aboriginals from early first contact to the present, the Indian Act carefully defining separate indigenous status, the entrenchment of privileged indigenous rights in sections 25, 35, and 37 of the 1982 Canadian constitution, two federal ministries totally devoted to indigenous issues, and untold billions of dollars of special programmes and funding reserved exclusively for indigenous people.Indigenous movers and shakers have eagerly embraced all these special rights by refusing to call for freeing their people, their lives, or their communities from the fetters of Canada’s colonial dependency. Instead, they have sought to materially benefit from and build upon the colonial dependency relationship..BERNARDO: Ottawa flips the switch on the gun confiscations and hands the keys to the RCMP.The problem with all these reports about MMIWG — the grounds for which they can be said to fail to properly explain the murder of these women — is their scant consideration of other explanatory frameworks focusing on the precise causes of homicide in Canada.While the reasons people kill impulsively are still disputed, many of them seem to be linked, in part, with a neurological inability to properly control feelings of disappointment, frustration, and anger as perpetrators interact with those around them, especially under the influence of mind-altering substances such as drugs and alcohol. Police reported in 1996 that 38% of homicide victims consumed alcohol or drugs or both at the time of the offence. The pattern has remained consistent since 1991, when this information was first collected. .There may also be a murder connection to years of personal disappointment and failure, which results in a combination of profound hopelessness and deep-seated resentment. Accordingly, the perpetrators tend to externalize blame by punishing those whom they irrationally hold responsible for their miserable lives.Regardless of whether these micro-level factors have influenced the disproportionate rate of the murder of indigenous females, surely many obvious historical policies have exacerbated the discrepancy between Aboriginals and other Canadians..JÄGER: We all hate ridiculously bright headlights — why not restrict them?.In retrospect, in the interest of full equality with non-indigenous people, Canada’s Aboriginals should have been treated in precisely the same way such people were treated around the world for millennia, namely by slowly but fully — and beneficially — assimilating them as part of the overall colonization enterprise.Only time will tell whether this full equality will ever be realized.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.The original, full-length version of this article was recently published by Canada Free Press.
