The recent announcement of a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women provides an opportunity to do something that goes beyond apologies and shame about the past. It’s an opportunity to restore dignity by seeing justice done.

We have seen public apologies, shame and sorrow in abundance. In the just-concluded Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools we heard from survivors’ often tearful testimony how they were physically and sexually abused, their languages and cultures targeted for elimination, their suffering and self-destruction transmitted to succeeding generations.

Official apologies are also often emotionally charged. Jane Stewart, the minister of Indian Affairs at the time that the Gathering Strength policy was unveiled in 1998, wept as she delivered the government’s Statement of Reconciliation. Church officials, as accustomed as they are to self-examination and gestures of contrition, were sometimes unable to hold back tears as they delivered their official apologies to the TRC.

Clearly tears are not enough, but if we look at the mandate of the TRC, at the rules that set it in motion and that it was compelled to follow, we see one of the main reasons for this emphasis on emotional testimony: the commission was, quite simply, legally weak.

It was one of those “victim-centred” truth commissions that stress voluntary witness statements because they lack judicial authority. It was not given subpoena powers, not able to compel testimony from those individuals (especially in government) it most wanted to hear from. And those who did volunteer to give statements (they were not referred to as “witnesses” — another avoidance of judicial authority) were not permitted to “name names,” to reveal the identity of those they remembered as unpunished perpetrators of crime.

These are not inevitable features of truth commissions. Worldwide, other state-mandated inquiries have had more far-reaching powers.

South Africa dealt with the naming-names issue through a carefully crafted regime of conditional amnesty, encouraging perpetrators to give testimony about their involvement in political crimes, with amnesty conditional upon their truthfulness.

The commission in East Timor, with a mandate designed by the United Nations Transitional Administration, was assigned so-called Special Panels for Serious Crimes, authorized to investigate and prosecute serious offences — which they did, reaching up to the highest levels of government.

There have been many commissions with significant judicial powers, and, in fact, fewer, like Canada’s, with exclusively victim-oriented mandates.

This means there are gaps in the narratives we hear. There have been no “history wars,” no clash between competing interpretations of the past, in either the commission’s proceedings or the public reception of it. The priests, brothers, and nuns who ran the residential schools simmered in anger in their retirement residences, with diametrically opposed views of their experience with the schools from those presented in the commission’s “survivor statements.”

Through Canada’s various commissions of inquiry, there were no (or precious few) direct confrontations between those who hold contrary views, not to mention anything resembling an official reckoning for the crimes (and criminals) of the state.

There is an opportunity inherent in the recently announced inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women.

The ministers and their advisers who design the mandate can do something different, something that goes beyond tearful narrations and apologies, and the hoped-for catharsis of victim-confessions. Something that can instill pride in process, as much as shame about the past.

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This time, let’s give it teeth.