Ex-minister was the face of reconciliation promise
THE JOURNEY OF WILSON-RAYBOULD COMES AT A TIME OF RECKONING ON INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS
On July 4, 2017, three days after Canada’s 150th birthday, Jody Wilson-Raybould gave a speech to members of the British Parliament in the Queen’s robing room at the Palace of Westminster in London.
She reflected, delicately, on the “remarkable journey” Canada had taken since Confederation, and the “important role” the United Kingdom has played in the country’s history.
However, she said, “not all Canadians have been celebrating Canada 150 so passionately. “There are voices that question the celebration.” She went on to describe her own journey as a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw people of northern Vancouver Island who became regional chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Na- tions, working to change laws that “have been used throughout Canada’s history in a misguided attempt to assimilate and oppress Indigenous peoples.”
Then she described meeting Justin Trudeau in 2013, when he first tried to recruit her as one of his star candidates for the 2015 election. “We talked about the future of Canada and his con- victions with respect to Indigenous peoples,” she said. “I came to see formal political participation as a chance to be part of a government whose leader made a solemn commitment to fundamental change with a vision for true reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.”
This week, Wilson-Raybould told a parliamentary committee in Ottawa about another, more recent conversation she’d had with the prime minister, one in which she’d looked him in the eye and asked if he was trying to interfere politically with her in her role as Attorney General of Canada. Less than four months after that she was removed from her position as attorney general and justice minister. A month later, The Globe and Mail would publish a story containing allegations that the Prime Minister’s Office had pressured her to help Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin avoid criminal prosecution, and that she had refused.
In her explosive testimony on Wednesday, she told the committee she’d experienced a “consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government,” including Trudeau, to make her change her mind.
Wilson- Raybould’s new role as Trudeau’s principal antagonist has come at a time of reckoning for this government. The Liberals made perhaps the biggest promises of their 2015 election campaign to Indigenous peoples, who responded, voter turnout on reserves jumping from 47 per cent in the 2011 election to 62 per cent in 2015. Most of those new votes went to the Liberals. As another election looms, those voters will have to decide whether Trudeau’s team has delivered on its promises, despite the controversy over the end of Wilson-Raybould’s tenure as the country’s first Indigenous justice minister.
She had been a human symbol of the Trudeau government’s commitment to reconciliation, and it’s hard not to see her departure as equally symbolic. For many Indigenous leaders, however, it’s more complicated than that. Many hold out hope that some of the government’s big commitments will yield results. Reconciliation, they believe, is bigger than any one person.
Still, this isn’t the way anyone would have wanted this story to go.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Sophie Pierre, former chief of ?aq’am, a community of the Ktunaxa Nation, who once worked with Wilson- Raybould at the B.C. Treaty Commission. “They lost one hell of a good woman, and one hell of a good opportunity.”
It could not have been a simple thing for Wilson-Raybould to decide to seek federal office.
“Many Indigenous people don’t identify as citizens of Canada,” said Gina Starblanket, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Calgary. “I’m not convinced of the merits of working from within a system that’s historically been one of the main perpetrators of violations of our rights.” But Wilson- Raybould clearly saw things differently. Under Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberals made a series of major commitments to Indigenous peoples ahead of the 2015 election. They promised a new reconciliation framework that would recognize Indigenous rights, and pledged to implement all 94 of the Truth and Rec- onciliation Commission’s calls to action. They promised to eliminate long-term drinking-water advisories on reserves, to establish a new fiscal relationship with First Nations communities and to launch a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Wilson-Raybould had long fought for the recognition of Indigenous rights and jurisdiction. As regional chief of the B.C. AFN, a position she held from 2009 until 2015, she co-authored a document with her husband, Tim Raybould, called the BCAFN Governance Toolkit, an 800-page volume intended to help First Nations negotiate self-governance and move “beyond the Indian Act.”
But during those years, she also demonstrated a willingness to work with government that sometimes earned her criticism. In 2013, she met with then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the Idle No More protests, even though many First Nations leaders railed against the meeting.
Pierre said it was a “natural move” for Wilson-Raybould to run for office under the Liberal banner. “There are Indigenous people who are so fed up with everything that they don’t see any solution in working with the federal government,” she said. “But then, that’s not really realistic.”
In October 2015, Wilson-Raybould won her riding of Vancouver- Granville by a wide margin, and was sworn in the following month as justice minister and attorney general. Grand Chief Edward John of the B.C. First Nations Summit called it a “threshold moment.”
If it was Wilson- Raybould’s determination to effect change for Indigenous people that paved her way into cabinet, it seems also to have played a role in her exit. On Wednesday, she told the justice committee that part of the reason she wouldn’t bend to what she called a “barrage of people hounding” her in the SNCLavalin case was that Canadian law has not always been respected when it comes to Indigenous peoples. “I have seen the negative impacts for freedom, equality and a just society this can have first- hand, so when I pledged to serve Canadians as your minister of justice and attorney general, I came to it with a deeply ingrained commitment to the rule of law and the importance of acting independently of partisan political and narrow interests,” she said.
There is reason to suspect that her defiance regarding SNC- Lavalin accompanied growing frustration concerning some of the Indigenous issues that were most important to her.
Last week, privy council clerk Michael Wernick told the justice committee that the September meeting between Trudeau and the former attorney general had been called to address “a very serious policy difference” between Wilson-Raybould and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett over a new recognition of rights framework Trudeau had announced to much fanfare last February.
It’s unclear what that disagreement was about, though First Nations leaders were raising concerns about the process at the time. Both Wilson-Raybould and Bennett declined requests to be interviewed for this story. Soon after, Wernick said, cabinet decided not to proceed with the framework.
That framework was a signature promise of the Trudeau government to Indigenous peoples, a pledge to enshrine the recognition of Indigenous rights in federal law. It was meant to help reconstitute traditional nations and get them out from under the Indian Act, and to help keep disputes out of court. In a statement when it was announced last February, she’d called it a “historic moment.” But last fall, after the framework was dropped, she made a number of public comments that seemed like veiled criticisms of the decision to shelve the project. “Thinking that good intentions, tinkering around the edges of the Indian Act, or that making increased financial investments — however significant and unprecedented — will in themselves close the gaps, is naive.”
The extent of this government’s progress on Indigenous issues is partly in the eye of the beholder. But it’s rare to find anyone who can’t point to some source of disappointment.
The Liberals have certainly made strides that have been applauded. They’ve launched a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, split the Indigenous affairs department in two, and supported a bill calling for the full implementation of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They claim to be on track to eliminate long-term drinking-water advisories on reserves by March 2021, and they’ve invested billions in First Nations education. But few of these steps have been unequivocal successes. “We’re now talking well into the fourth year, and the changes that we expected have yet to materialize in any significant way,” John said. Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, said he’s been disappointed by the slow progress on creating a National Council for Reconciliation, which was supposed to oversee the implementation of the TRC’s calls to action.
Add to that the recognition of rights framework that never materialized, the new consultations on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, the recent decision to move widely respected Jane Philpott from the Indigenous services department to the Treasury Board and to replace her with former veterans affairs minister Seamus O’Regan.
“They’ve been masters of promising everything but not delivering at the end of the day,” said NDP reconciliation critic Romeo Saganash. “I hope people will have understood by now. This has been going on for 150 years.”
For Russ Diabo, a First Nations policy adviser, all signs suggest that reconciliation is no longer top of mind for this government. “The treatment of Jody Wilson and her demotion, and moving Philpott and all of these things, it all signals that the government is shifting its priorities and Indigenous issues aren’t up there.”
But many people are still hopeful. Pierre said the Indigenous languages act, tabled in Parliament last month, is a “glimmer” of a real nation-to-nation relationship between the government and Indigenous peoples. “That hope is still there,” John said. “But now we don’t have a champion on the in- side anymore.”
For some, Wilson- Raybould’s departure may not signal a blow to reconciliation so much as a shift to something a little quieter. “I personally do not feel that reconciliation is dead,” said Moran, “because so long as there remains one single person that holds within their hearts the idea of a fair and just and equitable country … that fire of reconciliation is still burning.”
Still, it feels like a very long time since Wilson-Raybould left her first cabinet meeting in 2015 and told reporters how “honoured and privileged” she felt.
“Who gets the opportunity as a woman, as an Indigenous person, to hold the position of attorney general of Canada?” Saganash said. “Not too many people can be in that position. She was. And now she’s gone.”
On Thursday, the day after Wilson-Raybould appeared before the justice committee, O’Regan tabled the government’s long-awaited Indigenous child welfare legislation. At the announcement, flanked by Bennett, Philpott, national Indigenous leaders and Indigenous MPs, O’Regan insisted to reporters that the SNC-Lavalin controversy will have no impact on reconciliation. “Today is proof positive of that,” he said.
If there was concern about what Wilson-Raybould’s resignation means for the government’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, it was not on display that day. “Reconciliation is real, and we’re going to move forward with this prime minister for as long as he’s the prime minister and with this government as long as they do form government,” said Métis National Council President Clément Chartier.
But there was concern of a different sort. The government has tabled its child welfare and Indigenous languages bills with just weeks to go in the last legislative sitting before an election, leaving little time for the new laws to get through the House and Senate by June. When he stepped forward on Thursday, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde gave his own definition of reconciliation, a thinly veiled ultimatum for a government that promised the moon. “Reconciliation will mean that these two very important pieces of legislation get adopted for royal assent,” he said. “We have four months. That’s what reconciliation will look like.