By Abnor. Is it just me or are all the old men who are opposed to a national enquiry into the alarming number of Aboriginal women who get murdered in Canada the same ones who would likely be blamed, or at least found wanting, if we were to have a national enquiry?
While Wally Oppal’s multi-million dollar look into how Vancouver police managed to let aboriginal women get picked off on a regular basis and driven out to the Pickton farm for years scared the police into doing things differently, it failed to name names, eke out punishment or even reveal who the men were who regularly gathered at the Picton farm for sex and gratification.
How is it possible that neither Oppal nor the police really bothered to find out who those men were (or share the information with the rest of us if they did know?)
The old, white, male police chiefs of Canada, who you would think might be interested in a national enquiry into a thing like a specific group within Canadian society having a higher murder rate than most, and much higher rate of unsolved murders than any other group in Candian society, is opposed to the idea of an enquiry because … it will get in the way of their other good work?
Right …
And then of course there is Prime Minister Stephen Harper who has such as close and loving relationship with Canada’s First Nations people that, ever since his government has been handling things we have drawn the attention of the United Nations over the way we treat our Aboriginal peoples.
Canada’s aboriginal well-being efforts ‘insufficient,’ UN envoy says
UN report on aboriginals warns of crisis in Canada
Maybe the old men in the government and the police who are opposed to an enquiry should shut up and let the rest of us get on with finding out why so many Aboriginal women are being murdered and the police and the government don’t seem to know who is doing or why.
If middle or upper class white women were being murdered at anywhere near the rate Aboriginal women are, or if those murders were not being solved, there would not only have been an enquiry, by now the Conservatives would have struck a Federal Commission, held hearings across the country, appointed a special prosecutor and passed new laws to make it even more illegal to murder white women than it already is.
“What about the victims?” would have been their rallying cry.
[By now John Baird would have been called on to put on his tights, don his cape and go out at night – though we’ve heard he already does that at some of the trendier Ottawa clubs, with, believe it or not, the PM’s wife.]—
Abnor:
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Abnor
Editor’s Note:Abnor joins us from time to time with a question or two about what he sees around him. He has plenty of time on his hands and he spends a great deal of his time wandering the streets of Abbotsford wondering about what he sees and hears. He’s a modern day hobo with a Blackberry.
Abnor’s Story
