In the wake of the prime minister’s ninth whirlwind tour through the North, Yukon First Nations and political leaders have responded with frustration to Stephen Harper’s rejection of calls for an inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women as well as his record on justice and the economy.

Marian Horne, president of the Yukon Aboriginal Women’s Council, cited Harper’s “flagrant disregard” for First Nations’ well-being and the 1,200 indigenous women and girls killed or missing over the past 30 years.

“To say it’s not a societal issue — it’s his personal vanity and it’s his inability to recognize that colonialism was the precursor of these events, treating aboriginal people as lower-class citizens,” she said this week in an interview.

Horne was responding to the prime minister framing alarming figures, compiled by the RCMP this year, as solely a matter of “crimes” rather than a “sociological phenomenon.”

His remarks, which have resonated negatively across the country, came in response to a question by local media in Whitehorse last Thursday.

Horne, a member of the Teslin Tlingit Council, called for a comprehensive action plan born of a nation-wide inquiry.

“The RCMP are doing their job, but without the national inquiry, there’s not much they can do,” she said.

“It’s time that our murdered and missing aboriginal women are not a part of the sea of lost identity.”

Larry Bagnell, a former Liberal MP in the Yukon and current nomination candidate, shared Horne’s exasperation with the Conservatives’ self-described tough-on-crime approach.

“It’s ineffective simply keeping people longer in the university of crime, instead of investing more in rehabilitation, in addictions — which are huge in the North —in anger management, in education so that these people don’t come out and reoffend,” Bagnell told the Star.

“It’s kind of incredible that in a place like the Yukon, the word ‘environment’ or the word ‘First Nations’ didn’t appear in his speech at all.”

Last Thursday evening, Harper spoke at a private function attended by about 200 Conservative Party supporters along the Yukon River in Whitehorse.

The remarks took aim at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and served as a blueprint for campaign speaking points in the lead-up to the federal election scheduled for October 2015. (The PM could call one earlier.)

All three contenders for the territory’s federal Liberal nomination expressed disappointment with the prime minister’s stated priorities.

Ben Sanders cited figures showing the cost of the federal prison system rose 86 per cent to nearly $3 billion between 2006, when Harper first came to power, and 2011.

The Correctional Service of Canada, which reported the numbers, attributes mounting prison bills in part to government legislation that eliminated the two-for-one credit for time served prior to sentencing and toughened sentences for certain violent crimes.

“I don’t see that as a progressive way of building a healthy society, and it’s certainly not saving us money,” Sanders said.

Would-be MP Tamara Goeppel said in an email over the weekend she feels “insulted” by the “simplistic phrase, ‘do the crime, do the time,’” uttered by Harper in Whitehorse.

“Right now, our system is criminalizing mental health, and we are ignoring basic human rights in our jail system,” she said.

Last week, the prime minister highlighted his government’s reforms to the Criminal Code of Canada that upped mandatory minimums and reduced judicial discretion in sentencing.

“Do the crime, do the time,” he said. “On our watch, the crime rate is moving in the right direction — down.”

According to Statistics Canada, the crime rate in Canada has been on a slow decline for 23 years, more than half of that time under a Liberal government.

Goeppel pointed to the case of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old First Nations girl whose body was found wrapped in plastic in Winnipeg’s Red River on Aug. 17.

“How many aboriginal women need to go missing and have to be murdered before this issue becomes a priority to our government?” Goeppel asked.

She quoted Horne on the slow-motion crisis: “‘This is shameful.’”

Goeppel, Sanders and Bagnell also took issue with the sunny portrait of economic success and government fat-trimming painted last week by the prime minister.

During the final decade of Liberal rule, ending in February 2006, the government delivered 10 surplus budgets in a row and paid down the national debt, the candidates pointed out.

The Conservative government put forward eight deficits in a row, though came up flush with a $6.4-billion surplus this year.

Since 2006, the Tories have upped spending by 30 per cent, adding more than $160 billion to the national debt.

Harper told guests at last week’s reception he has ended government bloating. The civil service, however, has grown 14 per cent between 2006 and 2012, according to data from the Parliamentary Budget Office.

“It’s a sham,” territorial Opposition Leader Liz Hanson said of the prime minister’s theatrics in Whitehorse.

She highlighted promotional filming by Parks Canada during his stay, his tightly controlled public events and the concept of public accountability.

“Part of that accountability is to actually talk with people. He could have done that (tour) by hologram.”

The NDP MLA noted cuts to Parks Canada resulted in job losses for Yukoners employed as curators at the SS Klondike National Historic Site and in the communities.

Hanson also disapproved of changes from above to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act tabled in the Senate in June.

They would give the minister of Aboriginal Affairs the power to set binding policy for the assessment board.

Hanson suggested the shift in guidelines, which came following scant northern consultation, offers a window into what she sees as an almost neo-colonial attitude by Harper toward the North: “They’re still viewing this as his government’s source for natural resources, and that they will dictate how those resources will be taken out.”

Along with Bagnell, she added that the prime minister’s trumpeting of the revamped federal food mail program only underscores a warped perspective, given the reportedly poor results of a program intended to provide healthy, perishable food for remote northern communities.

“To have a healthy diet in Old Crow, a nutritious diet, it’s impossible under the program that the current government has sponsored,” Hanson said.

Bagnell opined that the government has “failed miserably” on the three biggest sectors of the territory’s economy: mining — “because government so damaged relationships with First Nations people, a lot of the potential projects in the North have just not gone ahead” — tourism, which is a bigger per capita contributor to GDP in the Yukon than in any other province or territory; and government — “the morale among federal government employees is very low.”

He also disagreed with the cuts to Veterans Affairs as well as the Kluane Lake Research Station, the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) industrial research assistance programs in the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and the closing of Revenue Canada’s office in Whitehorse.

Harper kicked off his three-territory tour last Thursday in Whitehorse by announcing a new $17-million research plan, funded by the NRC, that will draw in industry partners and focus on technology geared to the North.

The plan is the latest rollout in the government’s professed prioritization of the North, with Arctic research, resource extraction, shipping lanes, military investment and northern sovereignty all in the foreground.

Sanders criticized the government for “ratcheting up the aggressive language and posturing” on international affairs in recent years.

“I’ve felt that the international reputation that Canada once had that was so highly coveted by others around the world has in my mind been lost. I think a lot of Canadians feel that way,” Sanders told the Star.

Harper and four federal ministers wrapped up their northern tour Tuesday, observing part of a military exercise.

Operation Nanook drew on members of the military, coast guard and RCMP, among other government agencies, to simulate the rescue of a grounded cruise ship.

The stop-in came following visits to Fort Smith, N.W.T., and Nunavut’s Cambridge Bay, Pond Inlet, Iqaluit and York Sound.

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