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The suggestion was first made last month by Bernard Valcourt, the aboriginal affairs minister, in a private meeting with First Nations chiefs in Alberta. Aboriginal leaders questioned the veracity of the number because a report last year from the RCMP about those cases did not specify perpetrators’ ethnicity.

But in a letter made public Thursday, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said data obtained from 300 police agencies “has confirmed that 70 per cent of the offenders were of aboriginal origin.”

However, the letter, addressed to Bernice Martial, grand chief of the Treaty No. 6 First Nations, stressed that it is not the ethnicity of offenders that is relevant to investigators, “but rather the relationship between victim and offender that guides our focus with respect to prevention.”

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According to Statistics Canada data compiled by my research assistant Penny Handley, approximately 2,500 aboriginal people were murdered in Canada between 1982 and 2011, out of 15,000 murders in Canada overall. Of the 2,500 murdered aboriginal Canadians, fully 71 per cent — 1,750 — were male, and 745 were female (and one was “of unknown gender”). A further 105 aboriginal women were listed as “missing for at least 30 days” as of 2013, “in cases where the reason for their disappearance was deemed ‘unknown’ or ‘foul play suspected’,” according to a Toronto Star report). Aboriginal men and women are both much more likely to be killed than are other Canadians. And aboriginal women seem overwhelmingly likely to be killed by aboriginal men, notably their partners or spouses. After initially refusing, the RCMP recently confirmed Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt’s claim that 70 per cent of indigenous women’s murderers are indigenous men.