Majority agrees Indigenous women victims of ‘genocide’ but not on how or by whom

OTTAWA — A new poll suggests most Canadians agree that the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women amount to genocide.

But the Leger poll also suggests there’s disagreement about when it occurred and who is responsible.

Fifty-three per cent of respondents agreed with the finding of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which last week concluded that the tragedy is part of an “ongoing genocide” that has been centuries in the making.

But there was little consensus about what form that genocide took: 17 per cent blamed colonization and the loss of Indigenous lands to European settlers, 15 per cent blamed church-run residential schools and another 15 per cent pointed to the destruction of cultural identity and forced assimilation; just three per cent blamed racism.

As to who is responsible, 32 per cent blamed Canada’s British and French founders and 25 per cent blamed Catholic and Protestant churches; another 21 per cent said all Canadians share responsibility for the injustice while just one per cent blamed government.

The poll of 1,528 Canadians randomly recruited from Leger’s online panel was conducted between June 7 and 10 for the Association for Canadian Studies; polling experts say online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not generate a random sample of the population.

 

 

The Canadian Press