Churchill MP Niki Ashton says Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt should provide the data about who is responsible for the deaths of murdered indigenous women if such data exists.
The Globe and Mail reported March 31 that it had obtained a transcript of remarks Valcourt made during a meeting with chiefs in Calgary last month, which included the statement: “I will tell you ’cause there is no media in the room that the RCMP report states that up to 70 per cent of the murdered and missing indigenous women issue stems from their own communities.”
Ashton has since asked the government to share the information it had in the House of Commons.
“Will the minister stand in the House and release the data on which he based his claim, or will he get up and tell us that he made this number up to suit the Conservatives’ discriminatory agenda?” said Ashton, who is also Aboriginal Affairs critic for the NDP.
A 2014 report by the RCMP said about 90 per cent of female Aboriginal murder victims were killed by someone they knew but did not identify the perpetrators by ethnicity. The Globe and Mail reports the RCMP will release a second report in May.
Initially an RCMP spokesperson told the Globe and Mail the force would not disclose the ethnicity of perpetrators before saying later that he had no idea if the upcoming report would contain statistics about the ethnicity of those who killed Aboriginal women.
Raw data
Meanwhile, Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River MP Rob Clarke said on the television show Nation to Nation that the RCMP’s raw data would be released once it had been put into report form.
The 2014 RCMP report said there were 1,017 female aboriginal homicide victims between 1980 and 2012 as well as 164 Aboriginal women considered missing. About a quarter of these cases – 225 – are unsolved.
About 16 per cent of all female homicide victims during the period covered by the report were Aboriginal women, who made up about 4.3 per cent of Canada’s female population in 2011.
Nearly half of female homicide victims in Manitoba from 1980 to 2012 were identified as Aboriginal.
Between 1980 and 2012, killings of Aboriginal women remained relatively unchanged while the numbers for non-Aboriginal women decreased, meaning that Aboriginal women accounted for 23 per cent of all female homicides in 2012 compared to eight per cent in 1984.
Physical beating was the cause of death for 32 per cent of Aboriginal homicide victims in this period, almost twice the rate for non-Aboriginal female victims of homicide (17 per cent).
In Manitoba, 90 per cent of homicides with female Aboriginal victims were solved between 1980 and 2012. The rate for cases involving non-Aboriginal female victims was 91 per cent.
There are 20 unsolved murders with female Aboriginal victims from that time frame and 12 unsolved cases of missing Aboriginal women.
– Thompson Citizen
