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It’s not.

Article 2 of the UN Convention defines genocide as, “ … any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

None of these features apply to the murder or disappearance of 1,200 or more Indigenous women. These crimes, though horrific and far too numerous, were certainly not “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular racial or ethnic group by the co-ordinated efforts of some other racial or ethnic group. Nor do the organization, causes, and consequences of these murders look like they have anything in common with the genocides officially recognized by the government of Canada: the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan genocide.

There are other definitions of genocide but those accepted as being legitimate all include the requirement that the murder of members of other groups is deliberate, systemic and organized, not serendipitous, unconnected and unco-ordinated. This is why the United Nations General Assembly resolved in 1946 that, “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.” Translation: a lot of random murders do not add up to a genocide.