Lawyers, health workers, community relations staff in Winnipeg this week ahead of fall MMIWG hearings

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Representatives of the national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls will be in Manitoba this week, ahead of hearings scheduled for October.

Inquiry counsel Christa Big Canoe said the trip is a standard part of preliminary inquiry work.

“This is the process in any community where we do hearings,” Big Canoe said.

“We come in as a team and this gives us an opportunity to meet with families and survivors, to answer their questions, tell them about the process and their options and heard what they want to share with us,” she said.

Two lawyers, two health workers and two community relations staff arrive as a team for the pre-hearing meetings, she said.

Big Canoe said the inquiry is aware that there are critics and expects to hear from them this week. She’s hoping the face-to-face meetings will mend fences.

“Information goes a long way and when people have a opportunity to meet and ask questions it does provide some people with a little more comfort, a little more ease. There will be some people it won’t and, as I said, we won’t force anyone into the process. It has to be at their choosing with their full participation. That’s their family story, their truth, their’s to share,” Big Canoe said.

A second visit is planned for August in northern Manitoba, she said.

The event for Sagkeeng is scheduled for today. In Winnipeg, it runs from Wednesday through Friday with locations to be announced.

The lead coalition for families in Manitoba gave notice of the visit a frosty reception.

The inquiry has weathered criticism for months but calls for a hard reset started in Manitoba about two weeks ago, following reports that several key senior staff had quit. When one of the five commissioners also quit, calls came for all the commissioners to resign.

Manitoba’s northern Grand Chief Sheila North-Wilson and the province’s coalition of families of missing and murdered loved ones led the calls, saying the process is too important to be fumbled.

Hilda Anderson-Pyrz, co-chair of the Coalition for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Manitoba, said she’s conflicted over whether to participate in the process.

“The national inquiry lead commissioner Marilyn Buller reminds me of a ship captain trying to reassure the crew and passengers they are safe when the ship is full of holes and sinking,” Anderson-Pyrz said in an text exchange Monday.

Anderson-Pyrz said the inquiry sent her a heads-up email Friday, advising of the community visits.

“This is definitely not a trauma-led process. The national inquiry in its current form has majorly failed families and survivors in three critical areas: Communication, building relationship and building trust,” she said.

In 2014, RCMP identified 1,200 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada going back decades, including about 200 in Manitoba. CBC has identified Sagkeeng as the location with the highest number of unsolved missing and murdered cases of indigenous women in Canada.

Indigenous women’s organizations and families of loved ones have called for a national inquiry into the murders and disappearances for years.

Last August the inquiry was formally announced, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected and Indigneous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett made a widely publicized national tour to meet families to sort out the inquiry’s priorities. Ottawa gave it a two-year mandate and a $53.8 million dollar budget.

 

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca