Back in 2005, under Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal government, an agency called Status of Women Canada gave a $10 million grant to the Native Women’s Association of Canada. The money was earmarked for the NWAC’s Sisters in Spirit Initiative with the intention of building a national database of missing indigenous women & girls.
The project was very successful at raising awareness- right to the point where their rallying cry of 600 missing and murdered women was announced on the floor of parliament. Unfortunately, it appears there are significant questions about the integrity of their database- arguably the most important part of the project.
Earlier this month the RCMP made a statement about the Sisters In Spirit initiative that caught a lot of people’s attention. First, they said that the NWAC only provided them with 118 names our of the 582 they claimed to have in their database- no explanation has been provided for the remaining 464 cases. When RCMP staff searched the 118 names released they were only able to confirm 54 cases listed in police databases.
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