Canada still hasn’t responded to the independent official’s investigation that concluded children who died and were buried at Indian residential schools are not just missing but disappeared by the state, making them victims of a crime against humanity.
Kimberly Murray, federally appointed as special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with residential schools in 2022, told senators this week she’s received no word from Justice Minister Arif Virani a month after she hand-delivered him her two-volume final report in Gatineau, Que.
Sen. David Arnot raised the issue almost immediately during Murray’s testimony before the Senate’s Indigenous affairs committee on Wednesday night.
“I’m really concerned about this,” Arnot said, “because most of the things that you reported on require an accountability and a holding of the executive branch of government to account.”
Murray’s mandate was extended by six months on June 13, meaning it ends in December, so time is running out if she is to receive Canada’s response while still in her post.
“While I was travelling here, I was writing a letter to Minister Virani which I intend to send tomorrow asking for a reply,” she told the senator.
Virani had refused to comment immediately after receiving the report, saying he required time to review it, though he provided no timeline on how long that would take. The report comprises more than 1,000 pages and includes an executive summary plus an evidentiary companion report released in July.
In an email to CBC Indigenous on Friday, Virani’s office thanked Murray for her work but didn’t say when she could expect a response.
“This report holds immense significance and deserves careful, deliberate consideration,” wrote spokesperson Chantalle Aubertin.
“We are taking the time to carefully review its four volumes and will provide a formal government response in due course.”
In her Senate testimony, Murray questioned Canada’s commitment to finding the truth, pointing to federal restrictions that prevent using public money for certain types of investigations and a proposed funding cap on site searches that Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree had to walk back, following widespread outcry.
“We cannot treat the search for disappeared Indigenous children as a program,” Murray told the committee.
“Canada has legal, international obligations to support communities to find the truth, and it seems with the cutting of the funding that they don’t want the truth to be known.”
Some senators were clearly grappling with the question of what Canada’s parliamentary upper house can and should do in response.
At one point, Sen. Mary Jane McCallum, who was sent to residential school at age five, wrestled with the “impossible situation” Murray’s report raises when the perpetrator is also called to dispense justice.
“It just seems so, so unfair, frustrating and tiring,” said McCallum, pausing as she fought through tears.
“Sometimes I think I don’t know where to go with this.”
Murray reiterated many of her findings, calling for an Indigenous-led reparations framework and a referral of the matter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
Canada has not signed nor joined several international human rights bodies and mechanisms that could dispense justice, she said, including the American Convention on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Convention on Enforced Disappearance. When asked why, she said she believes the state has afforded itself blanket amnesty.
“It reduces accountability and it blocks survivors’ and Indigenous peoples’ avenues for them to be able to seek accountability and justice,” she said.
Her report is heavily focused on international legal obligations because the lack of justice and accountability for harms perpetrated in the residential school system was the number one concern she heard during her mandate, she said.
The government estimates 150,000 Indigenous kids attended residential schools, a church-run, state-funded system of assimilation that operated countrywide for more than a century.
More than 4,000 deaths have been documented in the system.