Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered opening remarks and took part in a panel at the Women Deliver 2019 conference in Vancouver on Monday.
The global conference focuses on matters such as “policy changes and investments, for the health, rights, and wellbeing of girls and women and achieving a more equal world.”
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The conference came on the same day that the report of the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) was released.
That inquiry said the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women and girls came as a direct result of a “persistent and deliberate pattern of systemic racial and gendered human and Indigenous-rights violations and abuses, perpetuated historically and maintained today by the Canadian state.”
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This pattern was “designed to displace Indigenous people from their lands, social structures and governments, and to eradicate their existence as nations, communities, families and individuals,” said chief commissioner Marion Buller.
“This is genocide,” she said.
- With files from The Canadian Press