Jody Wilson-Raybould finds unwavering support in her remote B.C. hometown,
From taking on teachers to running with bulls, Jody Wilson-Raybould was raised to speak truth to power
CHERISE SEUCHARAN AND DAVID P. BALL
CAPE MUDGE, B.C.— It was a long trip home from Ottawa to the tiny community of Cape Mudge for Jody Wilson-Raybould and her husband Tim Raybould. When Wilson-Raybould saw her mother, Sandy Wilson could tell her daughter needed a break.
That didn’t stop Wilson-Raybould, the MP for Vancouver Granville, from launching into her annual Christmas baking marathon. She spent hours making enough sugar cookies, the salty snack known as nuts and bolts and other treats for about 30 neighbours on We Wai Kai First Nation, where she is a local celebrity. When she arrives in this little Quadra Island community of 150 people, word gets around; when she goes out, everyone wants to stop and chat with the country’s first Indigenous attorney general and minister of justice.
When Wilson-Raybould finished making the Christmas treats, stuffing gift bags with baked goods and writing out cards,
Sandy offered to take over.
“She was really tired,” said Sandy, a retired teacher. “So I said this year I’ll take the bags around and put them on the door handles.”
What Sandy didn’t know, and the attorney general of Canada couldn’t tell her, was that Wilson-Raybould’s job had become a pressure cooker that was about to explode. The Prime Minister’s Office, Privy Council Office and minister of finance’s office had been suggesting, cajoling and even making veiled threats to convince her to help Quebec-based engineering company SNC-Lavalin avoid going to court on fraud and corruption charges, according to Wilson-Raybould’s testimony before the House of Commons justice committee on Feb. 27.
When Trudeau’s former chief of staff Gerald Butts took the stand before the justice committee on March 6, the country heard how the prime minister offered WilsonRaybould the Indigenous services portfolio, but she turned it down. “She said she had spent her life opposed to the Indian Act, and couldn’t be in charge of the programs administered under its authority,” according to Butts.
Just days before she arrived in Cape Mudge, she had the last in a long string of conversations about SNC-Lavalin with the clerk of the privy council, who invoked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s name. “I think he is going to find a way to get it done, one way or another,” clerk Michael Wernick said, according to Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, referring to a deferred prosecution agreement that would have allowed the company to avoid court. “He’s in that kind of mood, and I want you to be aware of it.”
According to Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, she took that last call “at home, alone” in Ottawa on Dec.19. “I was determined to end all interference and conversations about this matter, once and for all,” she said about the “lengthy” conversation.
So when she landed in Cape Mudge a few days later, Wilson-Raybould was ready for a break from the SNCLavalin file and ready to bake. The cabinet shuffle, her resignation as veterans affairs minister and her testimony were all in the future, as was the resignation of MP Jane Philpott, Wilson-Raybould’s closest cabinet ally.
Friends and family had no idea what was going on, but by Feb. 27, 2019, most of them were captivated by news of her testimony before the justice committee. Although thousands in the corridors of power were riveted by the news, those on Vancouver Island who knew WilsonRaybould before she became a politician were seeing the saga play out through a more personal lens.
Wilson-Raybould looked resolute during her explosive testimony, but Comox high school teacher and longtime family friend Tim McKinnon could tell she was rattled as he watched. The chin quiver gave it away; he had seen that telltale sign before.
In 1987, when Wilson-Raybould was 16, McKinnon was her homeroom teacher at Highland Secondary School. When she started coming to his class later and later, he asked what was delaying her. She confided that another teacher was making her stay behind to clean part of the classroom, saying Wilson-Raybould’s race made her “dirty.”
That was the first time he noticed the way her mouth would form a line and her chin quivered when she was upset. But Wilson-Raybould always stood up for herself, no matter the consequences.
“There was a point where she said, ‘That’s it, I’m not doing that anymore,’” he said, adding there was never an issue with the teacher again. McKinnon and his student have a friendly relationship to this day, with Wilson- Raybould stopping in Comox to pay a visit to “Mr. McKinnon,” as she still calls him, on her way to Campbell River.
Comox is where Sandy graduated from high school, and where the schoolteacher met her future husband, Bill Wilson, as they played on opposing baseball teams. They split up when the girls were young, and Sandy moved around a bit, taking daughters Kory and Jody to Calgary, Port Hardy, Victoria and back to Comox. When Sandy married Bill, according to the law at the time, she got Indian status.
A Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chief, Bill Wilson was the second Indigenous person ever to graduate from UBC’s law school in 1973. In the early ’80s, he helped draft the first amendment to the Constitution, Section 35, which underscored Indigenous rights in existing treaties and to the lands they lived on. In a now-famous video filmed during a 1983 constitutional conference, Bill told Pierre Trudeau that his two children wanted to be prime minister one day, and stressed that both were female. “Tell them I’ll stick around till they’re ready,” Trudeau quipped in response, sparking laughter from the gallery.
Twenty-six years later, both Kory and Jody followed in Bill’s footsteps and graduated from the same law school in 1999.
Although they are 14 months apart in age, when they were younger, the sisters could be mistaken for twins, they were that similar in height, looks and hairstyle. But where Kory was diligent and studious, Jody was “spunky.”
After law school, Kory started out practising criminal and family law, but her career path led her into post-secondary education, where she taught courses in law, Aboriginal studies and governance. By 2011 she was the director of Aborigi- nal education and community engagement at Langara College in Vancouver, leading to her current job as executive director of Indigenous initiatives and partnerships at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
In 2000, Wilson-Raybould got a job as a provincial Crown prosecutor in Vancouver, but was elected as commissioner by the Chiefs of the First Nations Summit in 2004. In 2009, she was elected regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, a position she held until she stepped down in 2015 when she became the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville.
Wilson-Raybould bought her house on Cape Mudge house around 2005 after her great uncle put it up for sale. Though it is a humble one-storey building, its colourful wood siding makes it one of the brighter facades in the community. On the back patio of Wilson-Raybould’s little house is a fire pit used for smoking salmon.
Sandy lives three doors down, at the end of the street. She moved to Cape Mudge to be closer to her daughter, and while Wilson-Raybould has only been back for brief visits since she was elected as an MP, she has put down roots there. In 2008, she married Tim in the little white wooden United Church a block away and celebrated in the community centre across the street, an all-night party that still makes her mother smile.
Sitting in her bright living room in Cape Mudge, Sandy Wilson remembered watching her daughter’s testimony. She had booked the week off, missing doctor’s appointments and a dentist appointment, just so she wouldn’t miss a word.
But it was the backlash against her daughter that agitated her.
“What’s upsetting me the most is that
“I never predicted she would be in the situation she was in (testifying to a Commons committee). But we were raised to stand up for what is right.” KORY WILSONRAYBOULD’S SISTER
some people said Jody couldn’t cope with the pressure.” It was the first time Sandy had heard the word “gaslighting” — that is, making someone question their own reality — and believes that Jody was subject to this form of manipulation in the halls of government.
While Sandy said she would “never, ever have dreamt” that her daughter would become Canada’s attorney general, she wasn’t surprised that WilsonRaybould went into politics. It was always on the agenda.
“When she was regional chief she said she was going to run for politics, and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Because I can’t do any more in B.C.,’ ” Sandy recounted. “She had to be higher up to poke more people to get stuff done.”
Outside Wilson-Raybould’s house, fishermen and hunter Howard Chickite was vacuuming his pickup truck in the driveway when Sandy approached to ask whether he wanted to be interviewed about Wilson-Raybould. “Jody who?” he joked. “No Jody here!” As Wilson-Raybould’s next-door neighbour, Chickite mows the lawn and keeps an eye on the house when she and her husband are away in Ottawa or at the condo in Vancouver.
Sandy said Chickite is part of a large family of eight brothers and two sisters who “adore” Wilson-Raybould.
“Oftentimes, when they’d come home, everyone here would be waiting for her to come, and the guys would put off fireworks,” Sandy said. “Everybody knows and says, ‘Jody’s home.’
“That family of boys basically adopted her. And now they look after me.”
Chickite welcomed visitors into his small, labyrinthine home, which has been in the family for years. It is fronted by typical white, green and red Kwakwakwa’wakw carvings of eagles and Thunderbirds.
In the back room, nearly a dozen taxidermied deer and elk heads stare down from the walls, evidence of Chickite’s hunting prowess. He took down the elk with the massive antlers with one shot from a bow at 50 metres.
He’s clearly proud of Wilson-Raybould and sees her more like a hero on a quest than a famous neighbour.
“She’s going to be the next PM; everybody here says that,” Chickite explained. “Who else is going to take Trudeau on?”
Sandy quickly interjected: “She doesn’t want that. But, oh God, would there ever be some changes.”
Chickite replied that at the very least, “she can put ’em all straight.”
He knew that Wilson-Raybould would come to the justice committee prepared, referring to the copious notes she had indexed by date and mentioned often.
“She kept all her emails and notes, logged everything,” he said. “You have to. She had planned it all out.”
To understand Wilson-Raybould’s values, those who know her always talk about her paternal grandmother, Ethel “Effery” Pearson, a revered elder of the Kwagiulth /Kwakwakwa’wakw nation, who had a huge influence on her life.
When the sisters lived in Comox, they would visit their grandmother at her house in town “whenever we wanted,” Kory said, and they saw her often at holidays and community events.
Sandy said Pearson taught mother and daughters to “learn your place” and follow the rules of the potlatch, and all three generations would travel to potlatches north of Vancouver Island in Kingcome Inlet and Gilford Island, events which could go on for days.
Kwakwakwa’wakw hereditary chief Robert Joseph, founder of Reconciliation Canada, said Pearson was “so influ- ential, a matriarch and elder who spoke her mind so vividly.
“She had a very firm grasp of the link between early colonization and the present and had always been aware of the impact settlement in our territories had.”
Pearson was renowned as a “noblewoman” in her Eagle clan, and was an outspoken advocate of Indigenous traditions and resisting Canada’s colonial agenda.
Born in1914, Pearson attended numerous potlatch ceremonies, lengthy gift-giving feasts and ceremonies that form the backbone of the traditional laws of many West Coast nations.
While women weren’t allowed to hold potlatches, Pearson defied tradition and organized her own, spending thousands of dollars to host the event.
Originally from Kingcome Inlet on the mainland, Pearson died in 1999 just weeks before her 85th birthday, but not before passing on decades of Indigenous teachings to her grandchildren, especially Wilson-Raybould.
“I came to know her really well as an amazing, powerful matriarch, and so resilient,” said Joseph. “She was so defiant in the face of criminalization that she would never surrender to it. She instilled that in Jody quite intensely.”
When Wilson-Raybould stepped into the role of council member for We Wai Kai First Nation and then regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), people who worked with her saw in her the influence of the nearmythical Pearson and her years of training in the potlatch tradition.
“There was a lot of things I learned from Jody, and they all revolve around governance. She was so bang on about that,” said Chief Brian Assu at the We Wai Kai band office in Campbell River, the centre of government for the five separate reserves of the nation.
As regional chief of the AFN, Wilson-Raybould developed a document to help First Nations take a step-bystep approach to self-governance, which refers to control over their own health, finances, education, policing and child welfare, among other things.
Assu was impressed by how Wilson-Raybould was able to develop a plan to bring self-governance to First Nations despite opposition from the federal government.
“Twenty years ago Canada took self-governance off the table with us, but she realized what it takes to get there.”
In her introduction to the 2014 guide, Wilson-Raybould addressed the injustice of the Indian Act.
“The effects on us were unfortunate, as the Indian Act system promoted an impoverished concept of government,” she said in the report.
“What is encouraging, though, is that despite the challenges, many of our Nations have already walked through, or are walking through, the ‘post-colonial door,’ are reconciling with the Crown and are establishing strong and appropriate governance with their own institutions of governance and the range of powers they need to govern.”
Assu said that We Wai Kai First Nation has been following the steps outlined in the tool kit to fulfil the vision outlined by Wilson-Raybould years ago.
The document noted We Wai Kai has started establishing their own local bylaws, schools and education, as well as their own forms of financial administration.
One of the leaders most impressed with her work on governance is Chief Robert Chamberlin, vice-president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and elected chief of Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation. This Kwakwaka’wakw band and its Kingcome Inlet territories are where Ethel Pearson lived and where Bill Wilson became hereditary chief.
Chamberlin said he was “in awe of the abilities” WilsonRaybould showed as he sat on the governance working group with her.
“Never once did we see her act out of character. She was always full of dignity and always respectful,” Chamberlin recalled. “She was also very consistent: She pointed to Canada’s own laws they’re disregarding — the 150-odd years of federal governments unwilling to embrace their own laws.”
While First Nations push ahead with self-governance, he said they also need their own voice “inside the government machine,” ensuring they articulate their nations’ needs.
“And if there’s one person who knows everything about the law and First Nations needs, it’s Jody,” he added. “But a lot of that came from her grandmother Effery, who was really close with my mom. I wish I could have both of their brilliance.”
That light did not die with Pearson. Bill said his mother was the one who bestowed Wilson-Raybould’s traditional name, Puglaas, at a potlatch on Gilford Island. In their Kwak’wala language, it is one of the “highest names in our tribe” and means “woman with integrity,” according to Bill. Wilson-Raybould uses it as her Twitter handle.
Bill Wilson once said he had Kory pegged as the one most likely to go into politics and become prime minister.
“Where I would be more cautious, she was less cautious, where I was quieter, she was louder,” said Kory, who is also a member of We Wai Kai First Nation. “We complemented each other like that in a lot of ways. She was always the one to be like, ‘OK, I’ll try something, let’s go.’ ”
It was that fearless, propriety-defying approach Kory saw in her sister’s testimony on Parliament Hill last week.
In 1993, the two of them were on a summer train trip through Europe when they landed in Pamplona, Spain during the running of the bulls. There, the locals told them “no girls” were allowed to join the dangerous stunt, where people are often gored as they try to outrun a stampeding herd.
But not one to be held back by convention, Jody had to experience it for herself. “She said, ‘Come on, we have to jump the fence and run just a little bit and then jump back,’ ” Kory recalled.
Taking her sister with her, Wilson-Raybould leapt into the fray, running for a few minutes until bystanders pulled them off the course. Kory was surprised by the scandal centred on her sister that has consumed Ottawa for the past few weeks, but she had no doubt about Wilson-Raybould’s stance in the face of adversity.
“I never predicted she would be in the situation she was in yesterday,” Kory said of Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, “but we were raised to stand up for what is right.”
In her closing remarks to the justice committee, Wilson-Raybould said as much, eloquently paying tribute to her grandmother and her First Nations heritage.
“I come from a long line of matriarchs and I am a truth teller in accordance with the laws and traditions of our Big House.
“This is who I am and this is who I will always be.”
“If there’s one person who knows everything about the law and First Nations needs, it’s Jody.” CHIEF ROBERT CHAMBERLIN VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNION OF B.C. INDIAN CHIEFS