After a year of struggles, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls resumed Tuesday in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.
“I’m so glad that you’re here,” Dean Meyer, whose daughter went missing in 2010, said on the first of three days of hearings.
Beset by internal difficulties, and having lost nearly two dozen staff members -- including a commissioner and an executive director -- the frequently maligned inquiry appeared to be a source of catharsis for those who came to testify on Tuesday, like Lesa Semmler, whose mother Joyce was murdered by her partner in 1985 when Lesa was only eight-years-old.
“‘I’ll be here at lunch to pick you up,’” Semmler recalled her mother saying during her emotional testimony. “And she never picked me up.”
The Meyer and Semmler families are two of 40 that will be talking about lost loved ones over the coming days.
While the inquiry has been accused of being in disarray, leading to calls for a hard reset, some are speaking out against its critics.
“They are putting the focus on taking the commissioners down,” Sandra Faye Lockhart, who will be testifying this week, told APTN on Monday. “You should be upholding the women.”
For such people, there’s still hope that their stories will lead to recommendations that will improve social supports, policing and health services to prevent more tragedies in the future. But to achieve that, chief commissioner Marion Buller says the inquiry will need another two years.
“That extra time and extra resources gives us opportunities for some more depth to hear from more people,” Buller recently told APTN.
That added depth, Buller added, will make future recommendations more concrete and useable -- but it would also mean that the inquiry end up costing more than the nearly $54 million it has been budgeted.
With a report from CTV National News Manitoba bureau chief Jill Macyshon
