In contrast to previous Canadian PM Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau has promised a new kind of politics – “sunny ways,” as he put it. The new prime minister promised to take immediate action on climate change and also to amend the recently passed (and universally criticized) Anti-Terrorism Act, a piece of legislation that, as a leaked Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) memo would reveal, specifically targeted Indigenous and environmentalists’ resistance to development projects.
The most important of Trudeau’s promises was the one he made to First Nations across what Indigenous peoples call “Turtle Island”: that the government would adhere to the true “nation-to-nation” relations between the Canadian government and their leadership. In what seemed to be a truly historic step, Trudeau included in his cabinet the first Indigenous minister of justice/attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould.
So Trudeau’s hypocrisy, when he was recently exposed as having worn Black and Brown face in earlier years, resulted in a firestorm of well-deserved criticism. Yet this scandal only highlighted the comparative silence surrounding a much more serious issue. This was his government’s handling of the relatively long-standing antagonism between the hereditary leadership of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and TransCanada-owned Coastal GasLink (CGL)’s $4 billion pipeline for fracked natural gas through the ancestral territory of the Wet’suwet’en.
