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So colonization did it. If we already know that, why spend two years and $40 million to say it again?

One possible answer is to find solutions. And both Bennett and Wilson-Raybould are rightly determined to do so. But again, what can the inquiry possibly say about solving problems like colonization, poverty, marginalization, inequality and other such root causes that has not already been said?

Government departments, including those headed by both ministers, have studied them for decades and have all kinds of ideas, pilot projects and proposals just waiting for top-level approval

It’s not as though these are new ideas. They have been extensively studied for decades, especially by academics who reject the “tough on crime” view that the root cause of crime is criminals. Government departments, including those headed by both ministers, have studied them for decades and have all kinds of ideas, pilot projects and proposals just waiting for top-level approval. And the ministers’ minds, and those of their associates and aboriginal leaders, are already made up.

It is a classic situation where everything that can be said has been said. And if not everyone who could have said it has yet done so, or as often or loudly as they wanted to, it’s no excuse to waste two years and millions of tax dollars going over it again.

During the last election, the Tories rejected calls for an inquiry because there had already been about 40 such studies. In particular, a detailed RCMP report as recently as May 2014 laid it out in ghastly detail. Exactly 1,181 aboriginal women were murdered or disappeared between 1980 and 2012. Of the solved cases, 70 per cent involved aboriginal killers, 25 per cent non-aboriginals and five per cent were not determined. Moreover, over 90 per cent of victims knew their killers. Whatever is happening here, it is not white serial killers travelling to remote aboriginal communities to hunt vulnerable women.