Canada’s first Indigenous person to be appointed attorney general had strong words for her former colleague, Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault, following the news that he falsely claimed Indigenous heritage.
“A Prime Minister committed to true reconciliation would have removed Randy (and the other Randy) from Cabinet long ago. Instead we get to watch white people play ancestry wheel of fortune,” wrote Wilson-Raybould in a post to X on Tuesday.
“So shameful and extremely destructive!”
Despite regularly referring to his great-grandmother as “a full-blooded Cree woman,” who he sometimes called “Lucy Brown Eyes,” Boissonnault recently apologized for his oscillating ancestry claims – instead claiming he had adopted Indigenous ancestry.
His recent apology led to a strong backlash from members of Canada’s Indigenous community and political rivals alike, including the former attorney general and minister of justice Wilson-Raybould, who was also elected under the Liberal banner in 2015.
Wilson-Raybould held the position of attorney general in 2015 under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He would ultimately have her expelled from caucus over for her role as a whistleblower in the SNC-Lavalin scandal where she alleged the Prime Minister’s Office attempted to pressure her to intervene on behalf of the Quebec engineering firm in a criminal prosecution.
Boissonnault said on Monday that after “reflecting on this a lot over the past days” he “unequivocally” apologizes for not being “clear” about alluding to having an Indigenous heritage.
His apology comes after an Indigenous researcher that Boissionault claimed told him he was “non-status adopted Cree” refuted his claim.
“I sought out advice to know how to talk about my family when I was running, and I want to say unequivocally that I apologize for not being as clear about my family history as I could have been with everything that I know now,” said Boissonnault.
His ancestral claims were dragged into the spotlight after the company he once co-owned, Global Health Imports, purported to be Indigenous-owned while bidding on federal contracts.
Parliamentary hearings reviewing the Procurement Strategy for Indigenous Business, a federal procurement program designed to boost the Indigenous economy, found GHI to be among those who received benefits from the program.
The hearings were part of an inquiry launched in response to suspicions that the program was being exploited by companies falsely claiming they were Indigenous-owned businesses.
Boisonnault responded by saying that his partner Stephen Anderson made the bid for the program without his knowledge.
His spokesperson, Alice Hansen recently told media that “Minister Boissonnault will be exploring legal action against Mr. Anderson.”
As for his own claims of Indigenous heritage, Hansens told the National Post “as recent reporting has come to light, it appears that the minister’s own understanding of his family’s heritage was inaccurate.”
“This information has come as a surprise to the minister and he has apologized for not being as clear as he could have been,” she added.
Boissonnault has been embroiled in one scandal after another since June over conflicts of interest involving federal contracts going to GHI while he was a cabinet minister, leading to what has become known as the “Other Randy” scandal.
Since then, there has been the issue of his false Indigenous heritage and more recently the fact that GHI shared a post office box with a cocaine smuggler in Edmonton, which came to light on Monday.
The culmination of these scandals has led the Conservative party to launch a petition calling for Boissonnault’s resignation.