Human Rights Watch, the international rights group that recently criticised Australian governments for their failure to protect the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, has delivered a similar stinging rebuke to Canada over its treatment of First Nations people.
In its 2023 World Report, released Thursday, the group said decades of structural and systemic discrimination against Indigenous Peoples in Canada has led to "widespread abuses" that persist across the country.
"Inadequate access to clean, safe drinking water continues to pose a major public health concern in many Indigenous communities and impede efforts to advance Indigenous rights in Canada, one of the world's most water-rich countries," it states.
The Report noted that almost 30 Canadian First Nations remain under long-term drinking water advisories, meaning the water in their communities is unsafe to drink, despite a vow by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's to reduce that number to zero by 2021.
In response, Canada's national government said 137 long-term drinking water advisories have been lifted since November 2015 and initiatives are underway to address those remaining.
The Human Rights Watch World Report said that despite Trudeau's government championing human rights and taking office in 2015, longstanding challenges remain across Canada, including widespread violations of the rights of marginalised groups including Indigenous peoples, immigration detainees, people with disabilities, and older people.
The group noted that in July 2022, Canada finally signed a US$14 billion final settlement agreement to compensate First Nations children and families unnecessarily taken into government care due to its failure to provide funding for child and family services in Indigenous communities.
The report also noted that in May, a Statistics Canada report found 81 percent of Indigenous women who had been in the child-welfare system had been physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
In June 2021, the Canadian federal government published a report promising a series of "transformative changes" to address persistent discrimination and violence against Indigenous women and gender-diverse people.
That same year the Trudeau government released a National Action Plan in response to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls' findings and recommendations.
However, in June 2022, an assessment by the Native Women's Association of Canada on the government's performance deemed it to be a "failure."
In December a First Nations community in Canada vowed to take matters into their own hands after Winnipeg police said they would not search a landfill site for the bodies of two murdered Indigenous women.
The 2021 national census indicates that First Nations peoples are 5% of Canada's population. A significant gap remains between First Nations and non-Indigenous Canadians by the metrics of the United Nations Human Development Index, which is "a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living".
