The Liberals found in her someone who wanted to make change from inside the system, despite the mistrust many Indigenous people harbour for the federal government
OTTAWA — 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.
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 meeting she was removed from her position as attorney general and 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 — to pass new legislation on Indigenous languages and child welfare, for example — will yield results. Reconciliation, they believe, is bigger than any one person.
But Wilson-Raybould clearly saw things differently. She made her choice during a period of fresh optimism stoked by Trudeau’s promises. Under his 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 Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.
“I would say her position … was the very epitome of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Crown,” he told the National Post. “It was a big, large period of optimism for us, that we would now begin to see the change in relationships.”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.
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. But few of these steps have been unequivocal successes. The national inquiry has been plagued by accusations of disorganization and poor communication, and by the resignations of several senior staff members and one commissioner. Several First Nations say the fixes made to their water treatment plants are only Band-Aid solutions. The new laws haven’t yet passed.
To those inclined to be critical, it’s certainly possible to suggest the Trudeau government is all talk and little action. “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.
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