Marion Buller, Chief Commissioner of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, speaks during a news conference at Haida House at the Museum of Anthropology, in Vancouver, on July 6, 2017.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Families of missing and murdered Indigenous women are calling for the inquiry into the violence to be restarted amid criticisms that it is off track and out of touch. But the woman who heads the process says that would only hurt those who have already testified and make others wait longer for answers.
Marion Buller, the chief commissioner, is fending off calls that she be replaced and the inquiry reconstructed after the resignation this week of Marilyn Poitras, one of the five commissioners the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed last year, and allegations of cultural insensitivity and a lack of communication.
Ms. Buller said starting over would only create more delays and uncertainty.
"I don't see a point in hitting the reset button, because that would completely undo the work that we've done since Sept. 1" of last year when the commission officially began, Ms. Buller said on Thursday in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "Setting the reset button would mean that the voices all across Canada, the people, the survivors who want to tell their stories, are going to have to wait even longer and in even more uncertainty."
Close relatives of some of the victims met privately with Ms. Buller and other commissioners at a hotel in downtown Toronto on Tuesday, the day Ms. Poitras's decision was made public. The discussion came two months after the family members and Indigenous leaders and organizations wrote to Ms. Buller to express a wide range of concerns.
After the meeting in Toronto, the group wrote an open letter to Mr. Trudeau asking him to halt the $53-million inquiry, saying they no longer trust the commission to move forward with its mandate and that the process lacks the ceremony, languages and medicine required for the comfort of the family members who testify.
"The time has come to restart this top-down inquiry and to rebuild it from the ground up," the letter said.
Ms. Buller said starting over would be unfair to the family members who testified before commissioners in Whitehorse in May – the only hearing with families scheduled before the fall. "It was hard for them to share their grief and their anger and their frustration with us," Ms. Buller said. "You could feel it and you could see it. And it would undo all of their sharing, in my view."
As for the criticism that the inquiry will not be rooted in Indigenous culture, ceremony, languages and tradition, Ms. Buller said that is simply not true and one need only to look at the hearing in Yukon to know that commissioners are sensitive to those issues. "We worked with elders and other advisers in Whitehorse to make sure that we did the right ceremonies, that we had the right protocols."
Ms. Buller said she thought she had had a good conversation with the family members in Toronto, listening as they shared their anger and their grief, and that she is committed to continuing those conversations.
"We have been listening to families and survivors about their concerns, we've been taking their advice all across Canada about how best to do our work and we've been changing how we do our work based on their very good, very valuable advice," Ms. Buller said.
But Maggie Cywink, who chaired that meeting on behalf of the family members and who was one of the signatories to the letters to Mr. Trudeau this week and the letter to Ms. Buller in May, said on Thursday that she and the other signatories have lost faith in the inquiry.
If the commissioners had demonstrated an interest in making significant changes, the families would have supported them, said Ms. Cywink, whose sister, Sonya Cywink, was murdered in Southwestern Ontario in 1994.
"It's heartbreaking for us to know this is month No. 10 and it's more of the same," Ms. Cywink said. "It's something the families have been looking for for 30-plus years … but it feels like now it is going into a vortex, like it is spiralling out of control …"
Mr. Trudeau told reporters his government has heard the concerns. But "the inquiry needs to provide justice for the victims, healing for the families and put an end to this ongoing tragedy," he said. "It was always, and would always be, a very difficult process."
A 2014 report by the RCMP said the force identified nearly 1,200 Indigenous women and girls who disappeared or were slain in recent decades.
This week, two officers with the Ontario Provincial Police were charged with criminal negligence in the death of 39-year-old Debra Chrisjohn, a member of the Oneida Nation of the Thames near London, Ont. Ms. Chrisjohn died last September after police were called to deal with a woman who was obstructing traffic at a London intersection.
The issue of whether to start the inquiry again or let it do its work has divided families of the victims.
Darlene Okemaysim-Sicotte, whose 16-year-old cousin, Shelley Napope, was murdered by John Martin Crawford in 1992, says she wants the inquiry to go ahead. She said she is not happy with the calls by letter-writers to start over.
"So much work has already been done," Ms. Okemaysim-Sicotte said, adding that it takes time to put together something the size of the inquiry and she believes the critics are being "knee-jerk" in their response.
But Ava Hill, the Chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River, said on Thursday it is obvious the inquiry will not work.
"There are continuously bad reports coming out and there's been so many staff who have resigned and now a commissioner has resigned and why is all of this happening," Ms. Hill said. "This is just retriggering all of the trauma that the families have already gone through because a lot of them put a lot of hope into it and now all those hopes are being dashed."