Missing women a national priority: ministers

Canada's justice ministers now admit the disappearance of some of the country's most vulnerable women has been widespread for decades and hasn't received the attention it deserves.

After a meeting this week in Vancouver, federal, provincial and territorial ministers released a report with more than four dozen recommendations on how to protect women living high-risk lifestyles.

The ministers said the problem is about more than B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton or Alberta prostitute murderer Thomas Svekla. In fact, the issue is Canada-wide.

"The positive thing that has come out of this is that there is a recognition that this has not received the attention it deserved," federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Friday.

There needs to be much greater co-operation between everyone involved, and that's the commitment from the ministers, Nicholson pledged.

'Availability, vulnerability and desirability'

The report was compiled by a working group established more than four years ago to look into the problem of missing women.

"The missing women working group recognizes the serious harm done to women, families and communities by serial predators who target marginalized women," the report says. It made 51 recommendations aimed at protecting women from predators who target victims because of their "availability, vulnerability and desirability."

Among the recommendations are that a national plan be set up for reporting missing people, that police forces use compatible case  management software, and that a national missing person database be established for both police and coroners to access.

The working group found that policies, procedures and structural responsibilities for missing people vary widely among police agencies.

Information sharing crucial

In murder investigations, the report said, failure to make connections between cases is referred to as "linkage blindness." It said the key contributor to that blindness is lack of information and lack of co-operation in sharing information.

That issue was one of several highlighted by the Vancouver Police Department when it released a report on the investigation into women vanishing from the city's Downtown Eastside.

The B.C. government has called an inquiry that will examine the police investigation and how Pickton was allowed to remain free while women kept disappearing. He was convicted of killing six women, but the DNA of 33 women — most of them drug addicts or sex trade workers — was found on his pig farm.

Serial disappearances overlooked

B.C. Attorney General Mike de Jong, the host of the ministerial conference, said people are still asking how so many women could go missing over such a relatively short period of time without it registering.

De Jong said the answers could have national implications. "How do we organize ourselves to effectively ensure that we are sharing information, that the degree of integration exists that is necessary to identify that a serial killer is actually operating in an area?"

The report also recommends that victims and witnesses get support in high-profile cases, such as the Pickton and Svekla murder trials.

The First Nations group Sisters in Spirit has said there are 582 missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls in Canada. The group didn't put a time line on that figure.

Nicholson said the latest federal budget allocated $10 million to the issue of murdered and missing aboriginal women, and an announcement around that would be made soon.