Canadian lawmakers vote to declare violence against Indigenous females national emergency

By Barry Ellsworth

TRENTON, Canada (AA) – Canadian lawmakers voted Tuesday for the federal government to declare violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people a national emergency.

The motion also demands that Ottawa make an “immediate and substantial investment” to fund a system to alert the public as well as authorities when Indigenous females or two-spirit people (those who identify as both genders) go missing.

“This is a crisis,” said Member of Parliament Leah Gazan, who presented the motion.

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not yet said if it will follow through with the national emergency declaration.

But in a statement, the Indigenous Relations Ministry said it will maintain its working relationship with various groups to deal with the issue.

“It is clear that we need to do more,” the ministry’s office said in a statement.

On its website, the ministry said in April that it was working with partners “across the country to implement a national action plan.”

May 5 is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, also known as Red Dress Day. The dresses are symbolic of as many as 4,000 Indigenous females that have gone missing or have been murdered since 1980. According to government figures reported in 2017, Indigenous females are murdered at six times the rate of the non-Indigenous.

In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls declared the violence amounted to genocide, a term Trudeau agreed with.​​​​​​​

In a poignant moment before a press conference on the issue earlier in the day, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Gazan sent condolences to the family of an 8-year-old-girl whose body was found Saturday on the Samson Cree Nation reserve in the province of Alberta.