Loved ones still waiting for task force to investigate MMIWG cases

Val Charlette wonders if her daughter's death would have been deemed suspicious if an Indigenous-led task force had been called in to investigate.

Angela Lavallee wonders if a task force would have determined someone was responsible for the death of her infant granddaughter.

Destiny Paupanakis wonders if the case of her sister's death would have been reopened as a murder investigation rather than written off as a suicide.

None of them will get the chance to find out. Not yet, anyway.

That's because the federal government has not created a national task force that would investigate all unresolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls — despite the fact that was a key call for justice in the 2019 final report of the MMIWG inquiry.

"There's almost this narrative … of 'Don't tell me how to do my job,' and that needs to stop," Angela Lavallee says. "Police and policing and medical examiners need to listen."

The call for a national task force — call for justice 9.9 — was one of 231 calls for justice in the June 2019 final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The calls, which the report calls "legal imperatives," are directives that governments and institutions were instructed to implement to stop the violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people.

The inquiry report directed that the national task force would "review and, if required, reinvestigate each case of all unresolved files of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people from across Canada."

It is, however, one of more than half of the calls for justice that, as of July 2023, has not been started, according to a CBC analysis. The federal government says it would need a commitment by multiple governments, police departments and Indigenous leaders to implement it. 

Thus far, that hasn't happened.

In a written statement to the CBC, a federal government spokesperson said that "the Government of Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to working closely with all partners on this critical, ongoing priority to address the root causes of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people, and end the ongoing national crisis of MMIWG2S+."

Families of lost loved ones, meanwhile, live with unresolved cases that may never be reopened.

Angela Lavallee's granddaughter Zaylynn Emerald Rain was just nine months old when she died in 2015. Despite Lavallee's suspicion that she'd been fatally assaulted by someone they knew, her concerns were dismissed, she says.

"No thorough investigation was ever done. Her [cause of] death was deemed undetermined," Lavallee says. "I was called the 'paranoid' grandmother."