The women who were murdered were not valued by those paid to protect them. It is that, rather than the presence of Pickton, that shows up the woman’s rights issue.
But no one has said there isn't a women's rights issue, what they have said is that it's being presented as being a matter of directly targeting women because they are First Nations. And it isn't about "defending Canada" it's about being accurate about what happened.
For example - The police did not look into those murders the way they should have. This seems to have been in part directly about not caring much about prostitutes. But the other thing that happened was that although there was a pattern that indicated a serial killer might be at work, that was not picked up because it was just accepted that women working on the street selling sex often went missing and were at high risk. Which is true, but it blinded the police to what was really going on even though some other people tried to bring it to their attention.
But this story consistently is presented as being about indigenous women, about being specifically indifferent to them, with the implication that white women who were in the same position would not have been ignored.
The case of sterilisation is the same problem. The article says they are targeting native women, and the impression is that this is only because of heir ethnicity, it is some kind of desire to stop them from reproducing. There is also a sense that this might be an organised state led initiative. They are very much playing on memories of the residential school system, that's what is brought to mind for any Canadian reading this.
But if what is really going on is that you have a group of women with serious problems, addiction mainly, affecting their kids who are being born into addiction and removed, and that individual doctors or social workers are trying to act to protect the kids (and maybe in some sense the women too who suffer terribly having their children removed) this is still a problem, but a different one. It's not state organised or led, it's not about trying to eliminate First Nations people. It's about trying to respond to poverty and addiction and individuals overstepping in an attempt to do that. It raises the question of why some ethnic groups are over-represented in this population.
It's not trying to deflect blame to ask that problems like these be understood and presented accurately, that journalists ask the relevant questions. It's not right to let on that this is happening exclusively to indigenous women if that is not what is going on. It's not right to completely fail to point out this is something that mainly affects women in poverty, or with serious addictions, or even mental health problems. And any solutions or initiatives to help these situations are not going to be effective if they aren't directed toward the real causes of this specific problem.
And maybe it is not surprising if people see sterilisation as a state organised form of genocide as more morally reprehensible than individual practitioners using sterilisation in very hard cases to try and prevent a lot of terrible suffering of infants and children. That doesn't mean the latter is good and I hope adults will be aware that good intentions can result in very bad practices, but moral nuance is not a bad thing.
How people see pointing this out as being some kind of apologetic I do not understand.