5 years after MMIWG inquiry's final report, former commissioners still waiting for progress

Five years after a national inquiry delivered more than 200 recommendations aimed at protecting Indigenous women and girls from going missing or being murdered, former commissioners say there's been too little systemic change across the country.

Former chief commissioner of the inquiry Marion Buller and fellow commissioner Michèle Audette, who now sits as a Quebec senator, told CBC News they aren't seeing evidence of the political will needed to deliver the paradigm shift in Canada's relationship with Indigenous women and girls they called for in 2019.

"We're frustrated, disappointed," Audette said.

"We lost faith in what [governments and public institutions] said they would do."

The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) was delivered to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a ceremony at the Natural History Museum in Gatineau, Que., on June 3, 2019. It concluded the MMIWG crisis amounts to a genocide.

The report contained 231 calls for justice aimed at all levels of government and sectors in society, including police, health providers, the justice system and media.

Since then, governments and public institutions have pledged action. Prime Minister Trudeau promised to turn the inquiry's recommendations into meaningful, Indigenous-led action.

The former commissioners said they're still waiting.

On the fifth anniversary of issuing their final report, Buller and Audette are urging the federal government to use what remains of its mandate to accelerate work on MMIWG and bring the lasting change they called for.

"The government can move," Buller said. "They want to be re-elected and what ... they need to do [is] make firm changes, firm systemic changes, honourable changes to the way the federal government is approaching the genocide."

Since Audette was appointed to the Senate in 2021, she's pushed the government to move more quickly on MMIWG.

While she said she's expressed her disappointment with cabinet ministers directly, she's also concerned about a change in government. 

Audette, who ran in the 2015 federal election for the Liberals in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, said she hasn't seen a firm commitment from the Conservative Party about how it would advance work on MMIWG.

She said she's worried MMIWG advocates may have to turn to protest again, as they did during Idle No More under former prime minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government.