Canada’s MMIWG Inquiry: Ideology Over Justice

The worst serial killer in Canadian history was a British Columbia pig farmer named Robert Pickton. During the 1990s, he preyed on impoverished women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—primarily sex workers whom he lured to his farm in the suburban municipality of Port Coquitlam. In 2007, he was convicted of the murder of six women and sent to prison (he died after being stabbed by a fellow inmate two years ago). But DNA from 33 other presumed victims was found on his farm, and Pickton himself claims to have killed 49 women. While the death toll is indeterminate, we know that many of the victims, possibly the majority, were from First Nations communities—members of that tragically expansive category that would later be called Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, or MMIWG.

It later emerged that police had missed multiple opportunities to bring Pickton to justice over the years. In 1997, five years before bodies were discovered on his farm, a woman named Wendy Lynn Eistetter reported that she’d escaped the property after being handcuffed and stabbed. One of Pickton’s employees reported that he’d found personal effects that belonged to women who’d gone missing. Even when police executed a search warrant of the farm in February 2002, they went there looking for illegal guns, not bodies. It was only sixteen days later that he was charged with murder, following a more systematic search by a joint RCMP-Vancouver Police Department task force.

It is indisputable that racism and classism help explain why Pickton wasn’t brought to justice sooner. Throughout the 1990s, rumours were widespread that a Jack the Ripper-type monster was stalking the Downtown Eastside. Had Pickton been preying on middle-class soccer moms, his murder spree would have been front-page news across the country, and authorities would have spared no effort or expense to find him. Protecting Indigenous sex-trade workers, on the other hand, wasn’t seen as a priority. 

In 2015, the government of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the creation of a public inquiry into the issue—known as the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls—noting that Indigenous women were significantly more likely to be murder victims than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Its mandate was to “look at all underlying causes of violence against Indigenous women and girls including systemic issues.” While Pickton’s crimes were unusually horrific, Canadians learned, his victims represented just a small fraction of the approximately 1,200 Indigenous women who’d been murdered or gone missing over the previous three decades.

Unfortunately, that inquiry became something of a farce. This was due in part to the managerial incompetence of its leaders; as well as infighting among staff, some of whom complained that certain victim demographics were being ignored for political reasons. When the Inquiry published its report, Canadians were treated to a turgid 1,200-page ideological manifesto that was primarily concerned with abstract denunciations of “colonialism and colonial ideologies.”

Indeed, the word “colonial” (or its variants) appeared 379 times in that document. Vast tracts of the report read like automated summaries of postgraduate reading lists, complete with shout-outs to intersectionality, Frantz Fanon, and Critical Race Theory. The most prominent claim to emerge was that the problem of murdered and missing Indigenous women amounts to a full-blown “genocide.” There was even a separate 46-page sub-report dedicated (unsuccessfully) to justifying that word’s usage.

And yet for all the report’s heft, its authors never got around to any systematic analysis of who was killing Indigenous women, possibly because the answer turned out to be off-message: A Statistics Canada analysis of court outcomes in homicides of Indigenous women and girls, from 2009 to 2021, determined that “most Indigenous women and girls were killed by someone that they knew (81%), including an intimate partner (35%), acquaintance (24%), or family member (22%).”

What’s more—and this was the disclosure that really made many Canadians wonder why we’d spent CA$53 million on the Inquiry—it turned out that in 86 percent of known cases, the person accused of the homicide was also Indigenous.

It goes without saying that a woman’s death is no less (or more) tragic when she shares the killer’s ethnic background. Moreover, even in cases where an Indigenous man kills an Indigenous woman, it is entirely possible that racism—and, yes, “colonialism”—are at play. Indigenous people have been treated in all sorts of appalling ways in Canada, and the dark legacy of past policies hangs heavily over the lives of many Indigenous communities. No reasonable person would dispute that such historical realities should be considered by any inquiry mandated to investigate the problem of MMIWG. But to pretend that Canada is prosecuting an ongoing nationwide “genocide” against its female Indigenous population is nonsensical.

But there’s more, unfortunately—and here we get to the reason why the tragedy of “MMIWG” recently became something of a punch line among non-Canadian meme merchants who have no idea what the letters even signify.

While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until mid-2019. This three-and-a-half year period overlapped with Justin Trudeau’s manic campaign to replace the idea of biological “women” in public discourse with faddish gender-inclusive terms that appease female-identified men. The initialism he eventually came up with is “2SLGBTQI+” (whose “2S” component signifies a special—albeit ill-defined—“two-spirited” LGBT category that Indigenous people can opt into).

And so, channelling the state-of-the-art in Canadian gender jargon, the Inquiry’s commissioners duly expanded references to “women” by addition of the words “and 2SLGBTQQIA people”—i.e. Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.

The term “2SLGBTQQIA” appears in the final report 1,197 times. Agglomerating that with the original “MMIWG” mandate yields “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA.”

If this unbreakable wi-fi code sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian MP named Leah Gazan just became an international laughingstock for using it at a televised 8 April news conference. (Indeed, she lengthened it even further by adding a plus sign to the end—suggesting that yet more letters, numbers, and/or symbols are on their way.) This unintentional comedy routine was made all the more meme-worthy by the casual, deadpan, en passant way the sixteen-character term rolled off Gazan’s tongue, as if it were a set of ASCII characters that ordinary Canadians ran together all the time in normal day-to-day discussions.

As some Canadians (including me) tried to explain on social media, this is not a commonly used term outside of activist circles. I also let people know that Gazan is not a Canadian government representative (as was being claimed), but rather a member of a small and increasingly radicalised hard-left party known as the New Democrats.

But by then, no one was in the mood for such nuances. Elon Musk’s three-word tweet on the subject—“Canada is cooked”—has, as of this writing, garnered more than half a million likes and 77 million views. Thanks to Gazan, millions of people around the world now believe that ordinary Canadians talk in this ridiculous fashion. We don’t.

Gazan told CBC News that the whole episode only goes to show that “bigots are offended by my positions around equality.” A more useful lesson she might take away from this experience is that the use of cultish ideological jargon can turn discussion of even the most serious issue into a farce. This is especially true when terms such as “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” (or “menstruators,” or “uterus-havers,” or “people with a vagina”) are used to soothe the sensitivities of men who demand the right to be called women.

If Leah Gazan had spoken of “murdered Indigenous women and girls” during that fateful 8 April media event, no one would laugh. Nor should they, since the phenomenon those words describe is real and tragic. Unfortunately, that underlying tragedy is easy to forget when the public figures lamenting it seem more concerned with hewing to ideologically approved jargon than communicating with ordinary citizens.