It’s hard to imagine a more perfect way the Canadian political establishment could have demonstrated the exact indifference the MMIW report highlighted as the key cause of the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women and girls then turning the discussion into a pedantic argument over a single word while entirely ignoring the substance of the report.

Well done.

Now I’ve been accused of being a pedant more than once – probably justifiably. Words certainly do matter.

And “genocide” is a big word. For most of us it conjures images of the Holocaust or Hutus hacking at Tutsis with machettes or Muslim enclaves shelled indiscriminately in Bosnia.

It should have been obvious to the authors that the assertion that Canada has been engaged in a genocide against indigenous women and girls would be contested, to say the least.

Leaking the report using that word ahead of the official release only served to further politicize the use of that word (and indeed the process).

Those are both decisions that strike this former strategic communicator as poor: choosing the most inflammatory description possible and then flat-footing the government are likely decisions the MMIW commission now regret. Or at least they should.

There are certain words that make a difference in shaping a discussion. Drop the n-word casually and you can rightly expect your audience to call you a racist.

Similarly by calling it “global warming” originally, the environmental movement lost years of action on climate change as wealthy countries are almost all in the northern hemisphere where the concept of a warmer February was pretty appealing.

But acknowledging those mistakes doesn’t let the politicians off the hook.

The PM’s initial half-assed response and subsequent (apparent) flip flop on using the word compounded the problem.

The refusal of conservative politicians – including the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – to use the “g word” was as inevitable as getting frostbite at Portage and Main. This has further politicized the word and, consequently, the report.

And that’s a fucking tragedy.

There MMIW process has collected and collated stories from thousands of women and their families across the country. They paint a clear picture of a country and a system that does not give a shit about an identifiable portion of its fellow citizens.

Volumes of information compiled by the Commission make it absolutely clear that there’s a problem. The Commission was equally clear in its conclusions about how that’s been possible: systemic neglect, indifference and remnants of colonialism.

And yet, nary a word has been said by the political class about any of it; just lip service and semantical arguments.

So what to do?

If the #MeToo movement taught us anything (other than just how disgustingly ubiquitous the behaviour towards women the movement called out had become) its that uncomfortable conversations are a good thing. They change behaviours – sometimes more quickly than we might have previously thought possible.

So whether you think the word genocide is appropriate or not, the content of the MMIW Commission’s report should be appalling to all Canadians.

It should stir us to action.

It should make us much more concerned about the women and girls being raped, abused, assaulted and murdered then word we choose to describe that behaviour.

And it should make us resolute to goddamn-well do something to stop it.

But by all means, continue picking gnat shit out of pepper instead.