Well, they certainly didn’t pull their punches. From the first page of the introduction to their final report, the commissioners who presided over the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women accuse Canada of carrying out “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples” that especially targets women, girls and LGTBQ people.

Inevitably, this has set off a legal and historical debate over the meaning of “genocide,” a highly charged word that evokes horrific images of the Jewish Holocaust and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in the 1990s. Chief Commissioner Marion Buller defended the inquiry’s use of that term even as she acknowledged the differences between those atrocities and Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people, saying what went on here amounts to “death by a million paper cuts over generations.”

It would be a mistake to lightly dismiss the genocide label after hearing the heart-felt testimony of hundreds of Indigenous women whose history, culture and even lives have been lost through both violence and neglect.

After an inquiry lasting two and a half years, the commission’s arguments deserve thoughtful consideration, not a casual rejection of the type exhibited over the weekend by a Harper-era minister of aboriginal affairs, Bernard Valcourt, who clearly hadn’t even read its report. Those who immediately get their backs up at the suggestion that Canada could ever be lumped in with the likes of Nazi Germany should at least pause and read the inquiry’s arguments, which are more nuanced than a few sound-bites would suggest.

It would equally be a mistake to let the “genocide” debate blot out discussion of the inquiry’s 231 recommendations — what it refers to as “calls to justice.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau conspicuously did not refer to genocide when it came his turn to speak at the report’s formal release. He’s aware that using the word would have all sorts of legal implications, not to mention offending many voters a few months before an election.

Nor did he promise to implement all of the inquiry’s recommendations, many of which range far beyond the issue that sparked its creation — the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases of Indigenous women and girls that have gone unsolved or even uninvestigated in past decades. Their lives were too often considered disposable.

Instead, Trudeau wisely took the more cautious route of promising that his government will use the report as the basis for a “national action plan” to address violence against Indigenous women and girls. Importantly, he said, the issue “is not simply a relic of our past.” The problems highlighted by the inquiry persist and put the lives of women and girls at risk to this day.

The crucial issue, surely, is what measures should be put in place that will make a real, substantive difference in the lives of Indigenous women and girls. There isn’t time before this fall’s federal election to make legislative changes, but the government must be held to its promise to produce a workable plan of action. Other parties, too, should be expected to spell out what they would do.

Many of the inquiry’s “calls to justice” deal with matters that should have been addressed years ago, quite aside from the issue of murdered and missing women. Ensuring such basic things as safe housing, clean drinking water and affordable food for Indigenous people should be beyond debate; it’s shameful that we’re still falling so short.

There are already stacks of recommendations in these areas, and the government would be well-advised to focus first and foremost on issues more closely connected with the issue at hand: the violence visited on Indigenous women and girls far out of proportion to their share in the population.

Those include reforming police services, including Indigenous forces, to make them more responsive to violence against women and girls. Bias against Indigenous people, and women in particular, should be screened out in the recruitment process and forces should hire more Indigenous officers — including females.

The justice system fails Indigenous people in major ways, and the inquiry is right to recommend greater emphasis on restorative justice programs and Indigenous people’s courts. Indigenous representation in all levels of the courts system must also be increased.

At the same time, the recommendation that the Criminal Code be amended so that killing involving spousal abuse must always be regarded as first-degree murder raises a host of difficult questions. Is it really the inquiry’s contention that the killing of an Indigenous woman be regarded as more grave than that, for example, of an Indigenous man?

Some other recommendations — such as a creating a guaranteed annual living income for all Canadians — are worth a debate. But linking that to reducing violence against Indigenous women and girls is a stretch, to put it mildly.

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This inquiry chose to go big, maybe too big to be politically effective. Their argument that governments at all levels must accept its “calls to justice” as a matter of legal right is bound to founder on the rocks of jurisdictional conflict and ideological disagreement.

But it would be a shame if its flaws led to no action at all. The government should rescue the inquiry from itself by building on the best recommendations to end the plague of violence against Indigenous women and girls.

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