OTTAWA—The federal government “accepts” that Canada committed genocide against Indigenous peoples, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday, giving voice to a key conclusion from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Trudeau recognized the finding one day after the inquiry released its final report at a ceremony in Gatineau, Que., where the prime minister avoided direct reference to the term even as he said Canadians need to recognize “uncomfortable” truths unearthed by the inquiry.

On Tuesday, during a press conference at the Women Deliver summit in Vancouver, Trudeau refused to say whether he personally agrees Canada committed genocide, but that his government accepts the finding that Canada committed what the inquiry said is a violation of international and Canadian law.

“The issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term,” Trudeau said Tuesday.

“We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”

After almost three years of public hearings and research, the national inquiry concluded that violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual) is caused by centuries of deliberate government policies that amount to genocide.

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An untold number of Indigenous women and girls have been murdered or gone missing over the decades — the RCMP has reported at least 1,181 murders and unsolved disappearances from 1980 to 2012 — and the inquiry found First Nations, Métis and Inuit women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than other women.

Questions came up quickly about the appropriateness of the “genocide” label. Former federal justice minister and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler said people need to avoid applying the term too broadly “because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants.” Roméo Dallaire, a retired lieutenant-general who led the United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Rwanda genocide in 1994, said he has a “problem” with how the inquiry used the word, even though he believes Canada’s failure to stop the disproportionate violence against Indigenous women and girls is “scandalous” in a country with a charter of human rights.

But the inquiry commissioners made clear this week, as Chief Commissioner Marion Buller said, that their finding of genocide was “an inescapable conclusion.” And on Tuesday, the inquiry welcomed Trudeau’s acceptance of their finding.

“This is an important moment in the truth and reconciliation journey,” read a statement from the inquiry. “The acceptance of our findings of fact by the federal government, especially our finding of genocide, is an acceptance of the truths shared by families and survivors. They no longer need to convince others that genocide is a part of Canadian history.”

Alongside its 1,071-page final report, the inquiry published a legal explanation for their genocide conclusion.

Canada’s genocide is not the same as the “Holocaust prototype” of the crime, the inquiry says. This form of genocide involves carefully planned mass murder, co-ordinated by authoritarian leaders within a limited amount of time. Examples include not only the Holocaust perpetrated against millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, but also the killings of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in 1994, the inquiry says.

The inquiry says Canada’s genocide is different; it concludes that Canada committed, and still is committing, “colonial genocide” against Indigenous peoples.

While “little tested” in international law, the inquiry says this type of genocide is “slow-moving,” with no clear beginning or end. It includes not just a single campaign of violence, but many acts and failures to act — called “omissions” in Canadian genocide law — that occur over centuries, implemented to varying degrees in different times and places, with both deadly and nondeadly consequences.

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These consequences, the inquiry argues, meet the international definition of genocide from the Genocide Convention of 1948, which includes “acts committed with intent to destroy” national, ethnic, or religious groups. These acts are killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, “deliberately inflicting” conditions to bring about physical destruction, preventing births, and forcibly removing children from the group.

Charting the “colonial genocide” through Canada’s history, the inquiry points to the “biological warfare” of the 1700s, when colonial forces gifted blankets infected with smallpox to Indigenous groups. In the 1750s, the nascent colony of Nova Scotia paid bounties for the scalps of Mi’kmaq people. The entire population of the Beothuk of Newfoundland was “completely eliminated” by the 1820s, the inquiry says.

Another instance occurred on the Prairies in the 1870s, when the government denied food to Indigenous groups during famines. Shortly afterward, the residential school system was created to remove Indigenous children from their families and indoctrinate them into the religion and language of Euro-Canadian society. The inquiry lists deaths from starvation and disease, beatings, sexual abuse, and forced medical experiments among the horrors of the schools, which existed for more than 100 years.

These events, and others, create “lasting, generational consequences” that have set the conditions for the murders and disappearances of so many Indigenous women and girls, the inquiry says.

But there are also continuing policies that it argues are consistent with the past approach to eliminate Indigenous cultures and peoples from Canada, the inquiry says. These include Canada’s failure to protect women from exploitation and human trafficking, to prevent deaths in police custody and to stop known killers from murdering again, the inquiry says. It also includes the continued removal of Indigenous children into non-Indigenous foster care, “coerced sterilizations,” and the “chronic underfunding of essential human services,” the inquiry says.

Marilyn Poitras, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who resigned as a commissioner of the inquiry over a disagreement about the direction of the process, said she’s not surprised by the finding of genocide.

“I’m an Indigenous woman, that’s not a hard thing for me to conceive of,” she said.

“The problem is, these are not Indian problems,” she added. “If we are looking at this as a genocide we have to look at what do you do if a genocide is happening.”

Another question raised by the finding is accountability. The inquiry contends Canada continues to breach international human rights obligations and that a tribunal should investigate both individual and state responsibility for genocide.

William Schabas, a leading expert on genocide law and a professor at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom, said Trudeau’s acceptance of the genocide conclusion will more likely have political than legal implications. He said the inquiry’s discussion of genocide is “very creative,” but that it is not likely the International Criminal Court or an international tribunal would accept it.

“That doesn’t mean the report is ‘wrong,’ because sometimes courts change their mind,” Schabas said by email on Tuesday.

“Indigenous peoples suffered terribly and continue to suffer in Canada. I think there is little difficulty in a legal sense using the term crimes against humanity to describe their experience, and (I) would have no hesitation in arguing the case before an international tribunal.”

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