On Wednesday, a clip went viral. Elon Musk called it “an implausible comedy routine” and added, “Canada is cooked.” Ted Cruz wrote, “The mental institutions were closed far too quickly….” Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted, “I think they’re just adding letters to mess with us at this point.” Matt Walsh told his audience that “murdered is now a queer identity.” One post comparing the acronym in question to a WiFi router password cleared 1.2 million views.
The acronym was MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. The person was delivering it in the middle of an argument about $7 billion in cuts to Indigenous communities. That part didn’t make it into any of the memes.
But the acronym didn’t come out of nowhere. And neither did the budget cut.
“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”
The Canadian government just dropped this absolute monstrosity (and no, it isn’t satire). pic.twitter.com/xY9R2W4kVz
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) April 9, 2026
What the Clip Cut Out
The woman in the clip is Leah Gazan, a member of Canada’s parliament representing Winnipeg Centre and a member of Wood Mountain Lakota Nation. She wasn’t riffing. She was responding to a budget that projects Indigenous Services spending to fall from $27.7 billion to roughly $20.1 billion by 2027-28.
The drop comes from two directions — active austerity cuts under Prime Minister Mark Carney, and critical programs expiring without renewal. Clean water infrastructure, on-reserve education, child welfare. A budget annex released alongside the spending plan listed future-year funding for several of these programs. The entries read: $0. $0. $0. $0.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak called the picture “absolutely concerning.” Friendship centres that provide employment support, housing, and mental health services warned their doors could close. The communities affected face a $425-billion infrastructure gap that the federal government previously committed to closing by 2030.
Gazan framed this against the government’s simultaneous $13 billion military spending commitment — a contrast she called “callous.” That argument is now buried under several million views of WiFi password jokes.
The Acronym Has a History Most of the Commentators Didn’t Know
MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is not a joke pic.twitter.com/VMLFVvMPCn
— Damien Slash (@damienslash) April 9, 2026
MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is not something Gazan made up at a podium. It comes from Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls — a three-year investigation that gathered testimony from over 2,380 people, including families of the missing and survivors of violence, and concluded in 2019 that what they described constitutes genocide.
The inquiry issued 231 Calls for Justice. Some were directed specifically at Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual Indigenous people, because the evidence showed they faced distinct and overlapping vulnerabilities to violence. The full acronym has been in official use since — adopted by the Assembly of First Nations, referenced in the federal government’s own National Action Plan, and appearing across Canadian policy documents.
Two-Spirit, for context, describes identities rooted in Indigenous cultural traditions that predate European contact. The acronym’s length reflects a deliberate decision by the inquiry to name every group the evidence showed was disproportionately targeted.
None of this context accompanied the clip as it traveled.
What Traveled Instead
I think they’re just adding letters to mess with us at this point. https://t.co/NRaW277wHd
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) April 9, 2026
The viral conversation was driven largely by American political figures and commentators — a U.S. senator, a state governor, a tech billionaire, and conservative media personalities — responding to a Canadian domestic policy debate they had no direct stake in. Their audiences, overwhelmingly American, engaged with the acronym. The budget cuts, the inquiry, the policy argument — none of it carried over. By Thursday morning, more people had seen the WiFi password meme than had read the budget annex that prompted the speech.
Gazan, meanwhile, is not a marginal figure on this file. In 2022, she secured unanimous consent from Canada’s House of Commons to recognize residential schools as genocide — the first such recognition in the country’s history. In 2023, the House unanimously declared the MMIWG crisis a Canada-wide emergency. Both passed without opposition.
Indigenous women in Canada are killed at six times the rate of non-Indigenous women, according to Statistics Canada. Between 1980 and 2012, they represented 16 percent of all female homicide victims while making up four percent of the population. That proportion has only grown since.
The clip has now been viewed millions of times. The acronym trended internationally. The budget did not.