From a guaranteed livable income to revising the Criminal Code: 15 recommendations from the missing and murdered inquiry

The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls includes more than 200 “calls for justice.” The recommendations range from local solutions such as safe and affordable transportation and funding for Indigenous police services to national-level initiatives such as Criminal Code changes and increasing the number of Indigenous judges.

1. Establish a national Indigenous and human-rights ombudsperson and a national Indigenous- and human-rights tribunal;
2. Create a national action plan to ensure equitable access to employment, housing, education, safety and health care;
3. Provide long-term funding for education programs and awareness campaigns related to violence prevention and combating lateral violence – that is, violence committed by one Indigenous person against another;
4. Prohibit taking children into foster care on the basis of poverty or cultural bias;
5. Fund Indigenous-led efforts to improve the representation of Indigenous people in popular culture;
6. Launch health and wellness services aimed at Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual) people, particularly to make health care available to vulnerable Indigenous people in their own communities;
7. Create a guaranteed annual livable income for all Canadians, taking into account “diverse needs, realities and geographic locations”;
8. Create safe and affordable transit and transportation services in, to and from remote communities, to reduce dependence on risky activities such as hitchhiking;
9. Revise the Criminal Code to “eliminate definitions of offences that minimize the culpability of the offender”;
10. Fund policing in Indigenous communities so their services are comparable to those in non-Indigenous communities, including modern information technology, major-crime units and crime prevention;
11. Fund training and education for Indigenous people to thrive in school, health care, media, policing, law and other fields;
12. Consider the welfare of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people in planning resource-development and extraction projects;
13. Remove the “maximum security” classification in the federal Correctional Service, which limits access to rehabilitation and reintegration programs;
14. Increase Indigenous representation on all Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court;
15. Develop knowledge and read the final report. Listen to the truths shared and acknowledge the burden of these human- and Indigenous-rights violations, and how they affect Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people today.