The Real Canadian Super Enquiry

It's tough to say whether an enquiry into the murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada would achieve any lessening of this wound which our country has. It is obvious to anyone who has eyes and ears that we have a formidable amount of what we call discrimination towards the Métis and aboriginal people, and others as well, including those blessed Mennonites even though many vote conservative.

I am a snowball, my wife is Métis. Her three boys, obviously Métis, were around their early teens when I first met them. They were in foster care. My wife grew up in foster care from the age of three, her mother was an alcoholic, she never met her father. All these people in my life hurt, from the past and from the present, they didn't need a res school for that. The boys are grown men now, gangs have taken their toll on two, the other has persevered although scars remain. My wife and I live in Winnipeg's West End, one place where we can walk hand in hand unvexing to the majority of it's inhabitants. We just want to live in peace, humour is our sustenance.

All cultures in our world have a hard time welcoming other cultures into their midst. It is part of a culture's armour to frown on infringers. So what do we do? People have become more mobile and infringers have become commonplace in every land. The experiment with apartheid does not work, unless tyranny is the desired outcome with it's characteristic rebellions. Areas like our West End have diversity and for much of the population the respect needed to get along, however we also attract an element which causes us to have one of the highest crime rates in Canada. One of the murdered women was found within eyesight of our window, and the Red River is a short walk away.

(As far as short walks goes, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights needs a huge set of flashing red lights on it's citadel. Please someone, warn Transport Canada. That thing is a menace to Police Force One as it circles our hood.)

Different cultures have differing views and values. The obvious solution to living together is for cultures to embrace each other and value the positives they each bring to making our mother earth a good place, while cessating on the ideals which have negative impacts. This does mean we all have to temper our tenets, which is not human nature. Enquiries recommendations have a way of being ignored or at best being halfheartedly implemented. The great ideological revolutions of our civilizations have come about slowly and bereft of enquiries. The transformation of our cultures ideals into those where we embrace each other will take hundreds of years, if ever, we learn from history.

Is it time for Canadians to have an enquiry into enquiries? Enquiries, those portholes into the workings of our society. We could enquire into the economic strategies, the religious backdrops to our values, on how to regard our foreign neighbours, on whether it's polite to eat with our fingers. You know, an enquiry on just exactly what the hell we're doing here. It wouldn't need to come up with any recommendations, just open up a debate and get people thinking. Much like the ideals of our Canadian Museum for Human Rights, huge flashing red lights or not.

That one trip enquiry tour, The Real Canadian Super Enquiry, fathoming the depths of our existence, our future role on this good earth. An enquiry utilizing the most efficient commissary model of our era. We could find out everything we need to know and save tax payers billions in the upcoming years. Seriously, we need to ask some deep questions, and our aboriginal cultures had and still have some pretty darn good views. Would an Enquiry into the Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women of our country delve into the depths, or would it be a superficial, ideological eschewal?