Canadian Politics Today

assimilation certainly was.

The cultures that exist today would not exist if assimilation was not the expected norm. The notion that assimilation is inherently bad is also nonsense. Culture is not genetic. It is learned. Any human grows up in a culture and it should not matter what culture their genetic forebearers had. The issue with assimilation is only when the process violates the rights of the individual but then details matter. Requiring immigrants to accept schooling in English or French is technically forced assimilation but it is also absolutely essential for the preservation of our society.

IOW, I reject your suggestion that assimilation policies are inherently wrong. You can argue that specific policies such as the residential school system were grotesque failures that caused great harm but the failure of specific policies does not mean that assimilation not a worth policy goal.

The racist right will try to ignore historical realities they don't like to own up to. Genocide may not have been the focus but assimilation certainly was.

Forced assimilation does not appear to be genocide as popularly understood. It is not violent ethnic cleansing via mass murder, etc. The colonial bounty on Indigenous scalps was an obvious historical genocidal strategy: The fact that that bounty is still law in Nova Scotia is a constant irritant to Indigenous people.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4003961/mikmaq-elder-scalping-proclamation/

But genocide actually has a broader meaning:
the destruction of Peoples "as such".
Assimilation intentionally imposed on a group of people by whatever means, is the destruction of a group "as such".
Forced assimilation is clearly a strategy used throughout Canada's history and in the present, to rid Canada of Indigenous Peoples "as such".
The government mandated 'Indian' Residential Schools were the largest and most obvious tactic to turn Indigenous kids away from their culture and assimilate into the mainstream, qualifying as genocide under subsection (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. at the time Canada signed the UN Convention (1952), and continuing for several decades after. 

Canada has a persistent reason, and the intent, to finally get rid of the identity as Indigenous peoples ... because of the land rights they still hold that could never be removed legally, unilaterally, by government and continue to exist today.
The land rights of Indigenous Peoples are a constant frustration to business/industry and governments due to Canada's resource-dependent economy, increasingly so at this time.

Canada's elected governments have "intent" ... economic intent to gain unimpeded access to land and resources.
Indigenous Peoples know this, and they experience Canada's "intent" to destroy them "as such" in many forms.

Official (police) dismissal of reports of missing and murdered women, the police and societal culture of  disparaging them and their families' concerns, dehumanizing them, all are now acknowledged to be "racism" at work. Indigenous peoples experience that racism and marginalization as just another face of the genocide that has persisted and continues throughout Canada's history to date.

This is the result of too many people in bad situations putting themselves in further bad situations, yes, the way we have treated these people has a lot to do with that, but the idea that we are actively trying to exterminate them is laughable

Genocide is a loaded word that gets people's hackles up. But that's because people don't understand its meaning.
Legally, genocide is not just the physical 'extermination' of people.
It is the destruction of their identities and their rights, including land rights as Indigenous Peoples.

and makes a complete joke of very real problems, and at some point no amount of money will fix these social issues, solutions have to come from within.

No 'joke' intended.
And the solutions from within are increasingly evident: reviving Indigenous languages, ceremonies, land stewardship, seeking autonomous control of children's services, education, housing, health services, governance, etc.
But Canada has a role to play there too, as the Trustee and administrator of Indigenous Trust Funds and fully in control of the release of funds to Indigenous communities.
Unfortunately Trudeau, like his predecessors from Sir John A Macdonald all the way to Harper, is trying to extort "extinguishment" of all Indigenous rights, forever, as a condition of that autonomy/self-government.

Canada still does have the "intent" to define Indigenous Peoples right out of existence.
And that government "intent" - disparagement of Indigenous rights - filters down through all of Canada's institutions and services in their contacts with Indigenous people, including police and the public, in the dismissive attitude that it's just a matter of "too many people in bad situations putting themselves in further bad situations".

Canada's elected governments have created 150 years of "bad situations" for Indigenous people, constant controlling interference in their lives because ... still trying to gain full control of their lands for economic reasons.

Sorry self absorbed activists don't get to change the meaning of a word because they think it helps promote whatever cause they are obsessing about. Nor does the meaning of the word change because those same activists managed to hijack a UN committee. Genocide means deliberate killing of members of a group with the intention of exterminating a group. Nothing more so  spare us your condescending lectures about your invented meanings for the word.

You obviously have your own definition of the term. Others go by the actual legal definition.

Legal definition of genocideGenocide is defined in Article 2 of the Conventionon the Prevention and Punishmentofthe Crime of Genocide(1948)as"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, anational,ethnical,racial orreligious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm tomembers of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about itsphysical destruction in whole or in part1; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

That definition does NOT apply to victims of crimes perpetrated, in part, by members of their own group. There is no intent to exterminate. At most the crime is indifference and laziness on the part of authorities. No rational person can read the UN definition and think it applies in this case.

Apparently you failed to read/comprehend the whole of the legal definition. Try reading the very last part of it. I assume you may have heard of residential schools?

The word don't mean what you think they mean. The phrase that qualifies the entire definition is *intent to destroy*. Laziness, indifference or even racism does not constitute an "intent to destroy". If it did anyone who every said they "wished someone was dead" would be guilty of murder if they person was later killed for some reason unrelated to their actions.

So you think taking children from their parents/homes, transporting them to distant communities and putting them into schools where they are beaten if they dare speak their mother tongue is/was NOT an intent to destroy?

Stop changing the subject. The accusation made in the MMIW report is the laziness, indifference and racism in the police force meant that crimes against indigenous women were not investigated as they should have been. For some subset of those cases, the perpetrators were indigenous men so this laziness meant some that indigenous men were not sent to jail for their crimes. There is not intent to destroy in these actions and therefore no genocide. In fact, no one can reasonably believe that the "complete destruction of a group" was an even remotely plausible outcome from the (in)actions of the police are accused of.

I'm not changing the subject, I am focusing on the actual subject of this thread. (Read again perhaps) And you seem to want to focus on this "subset" of indigenous people who committed crimes and ignore the many non indigenous criminals. And you presume to know what the thoughts were within the police forces who tended to ignore these crimes regardless of the perpetrator. Put simply for you, what's the difference between intent to destroy, and ignoring the destroyers? And once again, residential schools would seem to fit the legal description of the thread topic.   

Depriving them of the necessities of life, subtly but chronically over sometimes very long periods of time 
Eg, Taking their children away from their parents, family, community and culture, and forcing them into the dominant culture.

None of these apply to the MMIW issue. As for the other issues it is two way street. No one has stopped any aboriginal from working hard and being successful like any of the largely non-white immigrants who come to this country with nothing. They fact that they choose to stay stuck on remote locations and wallow demanding that the government take care of them is only their fault. No one is owed a living. Everyone, except aboriginals, it seem to understand that they are expected to work for the living they have.

So nothing the government has done in the last 80 years can be considered as genocide since the opportunities exist but were not taken. The government has never wished to exterminate the individuals but rather the government has wanted them to succeed by following the path that every non-aboriginal has to follow. The fact that aboriginals choose to defined following the non-aboriginal path as 'assimilation' is not the governments fault. The government cannot be blamed because aboriginals have an grossly inflated sense of entitlement.