True Crime

Red Embers (detail): Just installed in the Allan Gardens

The first I heard of the June 4 raid on Unit #18 at 280 Sherbourne Street (where we live) was when a neighbour e-mailed later that day to say that police had forcibly entered the property.

Then another neighbour e-mailed to say how his young family had been traumatized by the sight of heavily armed plainclothes policemen (7 of them) swarming the courtyard.

That neighbour had often speculated that the tenants in Unit #18 were dealing drugs. The signs were all there: a $5000 bike, no visible means of support, frequent visitors who never stayed long, emergency vehicles full of paramedics dropping by to deal with possible overdoses ....

And now this, an actual raid, in a neighbourhood where the drug dealers across the street have operated with cool impunity for the ten plus years we have lived here. Still, if the cops were going to take down only one drug dealer, it might as well have been the one living in our condo complex. 

The owner of #18 has posted an eviction notice on the door of her unit. I wonder who she'll rent to next.

Genocide

I have not read the report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, but I have read a lot of hand-wringing articles about its use of the word "genocide." To sum up, people say that while it is unquestionably true that very bad things have happened, what has happened is not genocide. To earn that distinction, actions need to be state-sponsored, deliberate, targeted, violent - you know, like Rwanda. And to confirm that point, Romeo Dallaire has weighed in. In an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Erna Paris says the report conflates the culturally genocidal actions of governments in the past with the fate of the women who have disappeared and been killed more recently.

So here's the thing for me. I think I get why the inquiry did not see a difference. It's not conflation. It's a continuum. The terrible violence against women in these communities - plus social dislocation, poverty, teen suicide and substance abuse - can be traced to the history of deliberate, targeted violence against Indigenous people in Canada that no one (well, mostly no one) denies.

A couple of articles fret that Canada, now that the PM has accepted the word "genocide," has joined a small group of global pariahs and can no longer invoke the moral high ground to decry the human rights failings of other countries. 

How about this: until Canada openly acknowledged the crimes it committed against Indigenous peoples, it had no legitimate claim to the moral high ground. 

Now that it has owned up, it can start its long slow climb.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen