“I cannot claim to have had a long standing ambition to become a Member of Parliament, let alone a minister of the Crown, but then I met a guy named Justin Trudeau.”
Such was the sentiment expressed by The Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, BC’s first Aboriginal MP and the first Aboriginal justice minister in Canadian history. Minister Raybould delivered an address at SFU’s Woodward’s campus on January 23 to a sold-out audience, which included SFU President Andrew Petter and Chancellor Anne Giardini, as part of a series on “Women in Public Policy.”
The moderator for the event was CBC news anchor Gloria Macarenko, who took the chance to list off the Minister’s lengthy C.V., which includes work as a Crown prosecutor, advisor to the BC Treaty Commission, and regional chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations.
When Minister Raybould took the stage, she received a standing ovation.
She began her lecture by speaking to her experience as an Indigenous woman and connected this to a broader history of injustice against, as well as resistance from, Indigenous People in Canada. However, she remarked that progress has occurred in recent years.
Said Raybould, “Since the failure of the constitutional conferences in the ’80s, Indigenous Peoples have been accumulating power: economic, legal, and political power, to negotiate as equals in order to reach, as René Lévesque said, ‘A civilized solution.’”
She spoke to the pronounced impact that the Indian Act had on Indigenous women. According to the act, only men could run for chief status and women who married a non-status person lost their Indian status and property. However, in her opinion, recent developments have been made in women taking on leadership roles in First Nations communities and in government as a whole.
Still, she cautioned that more change needs to happen. “Of course everyone is aware of our prime minister’s now famous ‘Because it’s 2015’ line [. . .] Nevertheless, the percentage of women MPs is still only 26 percent after the last election.”
Raybould and Trudeau first met at an AFN session in 2012 where he first asked her to run for his team. In 2014 she agreed to co-chair the Liberal Biennial convention in Montreal. She spoke of her experience there: “What we saw was excitement. We saw hope, and in the delegates present we saw a reflection of the Canada we believe in. I decided to run shortly thereafter.”
Raybould noted that the district of Vancouver Granville was not only her home, but also was diverse, and had no incumbent to beat. She ended up capturing 23,643 votes, translating to 43.93 percent.
Speaking to how her life has changed in her new role, said Raybould, “Well, I get about four hours of sleep every day,” she joked. She added, “It’s been a whirlwind. [On the day after being sworn in,] I started back to back 16 hour briefings and had decisions to make.”
After her address, Macarenko asked the minister about a clip that was recently unearthed that showed her father, Chief Bill Wilson, telling former P.M. Pierre Trudeau in 1982 that his daughters wanted to someday become prime minister. She responded, “The pride that I heard in my father’s voice when he was speaking about my sister and I was reflective of perhaps his thoughts around the potential that we had as a country.”
During the minister’s address she shared with the audience her hopes for what Canada could become, in particular under its new government.
“Indeed it is true that we cannot be the country we ultimately aspire to, and want to project to the world until the plight of Indigenous Peoples is addressed. And we will.”
