Status of Women Minister Patricia Hajdu, whose life before politics included work in the areas of homelessness, mental health and addictions in Thunder Bay, Ont., says working at the grassroots level was often like trying to save starfish.

“Everyone matters, but there is just so many on the beach,” Hajdu said the day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named her to cabinet, adding she was grateful for the opportunity to make bigger changes at a systemic level.

This week, the Star sat down with Hajdu to talk about what she calls her “dream portfolio” and the biggest item on her lengthy to-do list: helping to set up the promised national inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

A number of indigenous women or girls who have been murdered or gone missing in Thunder Bay. Do you have any personal connection to this violence?

“I ran a homeless shelter and 80 per cent of the people that stayed in the homeless shelter were indigenous of some background, so my personal experience is extremely personal. I’ve witnessed, daily, women who were raped, beaten and continued to be so. Oftentimes, they are victimized by also their protector, and so it’s a complex issue. It’s got multiple layers that often root back to poverty and exclusion and colonization and all of that kind of stuff, but yes I know women who are in that circumstance. I’ve known women who have disappeared and never been found. . . . I come from poverty, so of course (have a) higher propensity engage with people who are victims of crime. So, it’s personal and it’s professional as well.”

The Conservative government often framed this issue as being largely about domestic violence, with Bernard Valcourt, the former aboriginal affairs minister, asserting the majority of perpetrators were aboriginal men. Still, family violence is one aspect of this problem, so how do you tackle that in a sensitive way?

“It’s never as simple as perpetrator and victim, in my experience. There is always a host of other factors that increase people’s risk to becoming a victim and risk to becoming a perpetrator, so we need to be really careful at these early stages that we are not making assumptions. . . . I think we have some suspicions, especially around the social determinants of health. We know that living in poverty increases risk factors for a whole bunch of health outcomes and social outcomes and that’s pretty much as far as I would go, because until we hear from the families that are involved, from the communities and from the organizations that work really closely with these families, we don’t want to make any assumptions.”

The Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence against Indigenous Women reviewed 58 reports containing 700 recommendations and found few of them have been implemented. Does Status of Women Canada have a role to play in taking action on some of these things while the inquiry does its work?

“I echo the concern of people that a report without action is just another report on a shelf . . . but we do have a government that is very committed to action, not just on this file but on the recommendations in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and I think those things will tie in with the findings of the inquiry and strengthen and support the need for action, so I’m confident that we have the political leadership that we need to actually move beyond reports and into action.”

Status of Women has traditionally been a junior portfolio, but Trudeau, as part of his commitment to achieve gender parity in cabinet, named you as a full minister. Is there enough in your mandate to justify this move?

“There is enough for me . . . It’s beneficial to the entire country to have women more engaged in leadership, women succeeding economically and of course addressing violence against women. These are all really big things and with a full minister we can make sure that our voice is heard at cabinet but also that our voice is heard across the country in terms of why this is valuable and what kinds of outcomes we hope to achieve, so I think there is a real opportunity here and it is a reflection of our prime minister that this portfolio does have full ministerial leadership, because it’s an indication of how much importance he places on it.”

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