Two years after the tabling of the Viens Commission report – and as the first anniversary of Joyce Echaquan’s death approaches – Quebec announced on Friday that 68 of the report’s 142 recommendations have been or are in the process of being implemented.
At the same date last year, that number was 51.
The Minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs, Ian Lafrenière, has pledged to publish the list of actions on his ministry’s website, and to update it over the months. However, he invited the public to “focus on the qualitative aspect more than on the figures”. It is not a “mathematical exercise”; “Not a grocery list,” he insisted.
In his tour of indigenous communities this summer, the follow-up to the Viens report was nevertheless “at the heart of our actions”, said the Minister.
The Commission of Inquiry on Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Certain Public Services (Viens Commission) issued its report in September 2019. The Commission was set up in the wake of the events in Val-d’Or, during which women indigenous people denounced the alleged abuses of the police.
Last year, a government source told the To have to that the “red alert” had been triggered as the first anniversary of the Viens report was approached. The Prime Minister’s Office set about making an inventory of the recommendations that had been followed and realized, with amazement, the backlog it had accumulated.
Watch video
Reference-feedproxy.google.com