RCMP database on missing women delayed

The RCMP national database that was set to replace the database that the Native Women’s Association of Canada’s Sisters in Spirit (SIS) initiative had created to track data on missing and murdered Aboriginal women has now been delayed until 2013.

When the Conservative government promised new funding to address the issue in 2010, it had at the same time cut all funding to support research conducted by SIS.

By late 2010, the government announced that much of the $10 million it had put aside in the 2010 budget would be going to the RCMP to address missing and murdered Aboriginal women and a large part of this strategy would be through a new national database.

The new database however may not even collect information that would identify these women as Aboriginal, negating SIS’s research that pointed to how much of this violence had been specifically racial. During its five-year mandate until 2010, SIS collected data on showing that there were almost 600 missing and/or murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, many of whose cases were never solved.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in 2010 that the issue was pressing to the government, the new database will not be available until 2013.