Last month I was in Sechelt, BC, for the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts. It was a beautiful setting for what turned out to be a fabulous festival. I felt lucky to be a part of it, and the same goes for the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival which took place last weekend. There were some great writers doing their thing on the banks of the Eramosa River. Was fun to be a part of it!

The failure of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to take adequate action with respect to Canada’s missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls has once again made the news following yesterday’s release of the UN Human Rights Committee’s report on Canada. The report slammed Harper’s government for a broad range of human rights violations and it was unequivocal in its condemnation of the government on this matter, stating that “[t]he Committee is concerned that indigenous women and girls are disproportionately affected by life-threatening forms of violence, homicides and disappearances. Notably, the Committee is concerned about the State party’s reported failure to provide adequate and effective responses to this issue across the territory of the State party.” This latest report by the UN echoed the findings by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), released in March, which took the Canadian government to task for committing “a grave violation of the rights of Aboriginal women by failing to promptly and thoroughly investigate the high levels of violence they suffer,” and it joined CEDAW and others in calling for a national inquiry.

Sifting through these reports reminded me of a powerful exhibit I saw last month at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, The REDress Project by Winnipeg’s Jaime Black, and the terrible sadness of empty red dresses floating in a sea of birch.