Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he accepts a government inquiry's finding that the disappearances and deaths of possibly thousands of indigenous women, victims of endemic violence in Canada, amounted to genocide.
A four-member commission investigating the disproportionate crime levels affecting indigenous women over the past three decades presented this conclusion in a report Monday.
"We accept the finding that this was genocide," Trudeau told reporters at a women's rights conference in Vancouver.
The prime minister had come under fire for not using the word "genocide" in his speech when he accepted the report.
The commissioners found that the perpetrators of the violence include indigenous and non-indigenous family members and partners, casual acquaintances and serial killers.
But they went further in linking the deaths to endemic poverty, racism, sexism, and other social ills traced back to failed attempts by early colonizers and beyond to force indigenous people to integrate.
Use of the term genocide to describe the disappearances and deaths of at least 1,200 indigenous women between 1980 and 2012 has since provoked a heated debate.
Critics -- including retired general Romeo Dallaire, who oversaw the 1994 UN mission in Rwanda that failed to prevent genocide in that country -- said the report's language is too strong and does not fit the international or legal definitions of genocide.
"I think we have to guard against using that term in too many ways, because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants," former attorney general Irwin Cotler told public broadcaster CBC.
The inquiry' chief commissioner Marion Buller, who has said the true number of indigenous fatalities is likely much higher, had rejected such views on Monday, saying: "The type of genocide we have in Canada is... death by a million small cuts, for generations."
