08) LEGAL GROUPS RESPOND TO OPPAL REPORT
PV Vancouver Bureau
Almost a year after it was originally expected to go to the Attorney General, the final 1500-page report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, "Forsaken", was released on Dec. 17, 2012.
Three progressive legal organizations - the BC Civil Liberties Association, Pivot Legal Society, and West Coast LEAF (Legal and Education Fund) - had warned that the inquiry was built on a series of profound mistakes, including the appointment of a commissioner, Wally Oppal, who had stated he saw no need for an inquiry. They noted the lack of community consultation on the terms of reference, and the failure to fund groups granted participant status at the inquiry. These errors, they warned, undermined the ability of the Inquiry to bring forward voices that have been silenced, rebuild relationships, and promote trust and healing. However, they also hoped that the evidence of the families, independent legal council for the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, and the police themselves would lead to useful recommendations for change.
"Forsaken" includes 63 recommendations on equality, community engagement, collaboration and accountability. Commissioner Oppal also urged the BC government to commit to two immediate measures: funding for existing centres that provide emergency services to women engaged in the sex trade, to enable them to remain open 24 hours per day; and an enhanced public transit system to provide a safer travel option connecting communities along Highway 16 where many women have been killed or gone missing. The province has already allocated $750,000 the first measure, far less than it spent on lawyers for the commission.
As the three groups noted, since this Inquiry focused on the internal workings of the police and criminal justice system, "the vast majority of the recommendations are focused on technical questions related to information sharing and other bureaucratic protocols of the criminal justice system. In spite of this... buried in the report are a number of important recommendations that could make our justice system significantly more responsive to the needs and realities of vulnerable women, as well as accountable to marginalized communities and to the public as a whole."
These include equality‑promoting measures which have "the potential to address the biases within the criminal justice system (which sadly were replicated in the Inquiry process), whereby those women most vulnerable to violence are not considered credible as witnesses as a result of those precise vulnerabilities."
For example, Oppal urges steps to counter the bias of police, lawyers and judges against people who are affected by drug and alcohol use, and against women in the survival sex trade. His report calls for changes to better allow vulnerable witnesses, including those who have been sexually assaulted or suffer from addictions, to take part in court processes. Another important recommendation urges that the RCMP should be included in the provincial police complaints process.
But the groups say that these and other equality‑promoting measures are recommended by the Commission, it is unclear how these changes will be implemented and enforced.
Some of Oppal's recommendations go in a negative direction, such as steps to promote "informal" methods of police discipline, particularly in marginalized communities. As the groups point out, "stressing alternative discipline when there has still not been a single police officer who has ever been disciplined for failing to investigate the missing and murdered women in this province is an insult to all involved."
In this context, it is shocking that Oppal's only finding of misconduct was levied against Cameron Ward, "the lawyer given the herculean task of representing all of the families in the face of dozens of police and government lawyers."
Perhaps most significant, as the legal community and other progressive movements have stressed, the Oppal Inquiry had no mandate to address the systemic racism behind the wave of murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women in British Columbia.
How different would the situation have been if unemployment among Aboriginal people wasn't in the fifty percent range, or if society provided a guaranteed livable income and decent low-cost housing for all? Such policies could have allowed many of the murdered women a much wider range of options to survive, and some hope for their futures.
Instead, Oppal's exclusive focus was on the criminal justice system. It may be that his report will encourage police forces to take quicker action when Aboriginal women are attacked or go missing. From this perspective, perhaps the most significant outcome of this Inquiry is the determination by Aboriginal peoples and their allies that violence against women must be challenged in a more direct way than in the past.
As seen by the massive Aboriginal opposition to the Enbridge pipeline project, and the upsurge around the Idle No More movement, the struggle against systemic racism and colonialism in Canada is on the rise. This will inevitably include much sharper scrutiny of racist actions by police forces, and that represents real progress.
(The above article is from the January 1-31, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)