THE REAL WILSON-RAYBOULD PROBLEM

  Black:    Wilson-Raybould intervened in the Restoule case, dealing with the Robinson treaties over the northern Great Lakes, and worked to ensure that the settlement would be declared retroactive to 1874 — a back-digging lottery jackpot for 21 First Nations without buying a ticket. The justice minister found herself in increasingly difficult disagreement with the minister for Crown-Indigenous Relations (a ludicrously Victorian title), Carolyn Bennett, who made a commendable effort to prevent the non-native 98.5 per cent of Canadians from being left shivering fiscally and culturally for the supposed wrongdoing of their forebears, and in the case of descendants of non-European immigrants, such as Asians or people from the Caribbean, coated in vicarious guilt.

   Some of us warned where this was going. The prime minister and his senior collaborators, including the former principal secretary (Gerald Butts) and the clerk of the Privy Council (Michael Wernick, a non-political figure and the country’s senior civil servant), finally, after warning signals had become more frequent than a healthy jogger’s heartbeat in mid-run, and louder than the foghorn of R.M.S. Queen Mary, tried to put on the brakes. The prime minister shuffled the justice minister to veteran’s affairs (for which she was even less qualified than she was to be attorney general — I don’t like to imagine what her conception of war veterans was). On her way out, on Jan. 11, Wilson-Raybould issued a “practice directive” to the justice ministry requiring Crown lawyers to cease adversarial arguments against Aboriginal litigants. She had, throughout her tenure, tied the government’s hands in responding to suits from Aboriginal organizations, and as she left, she tried to impose a policy of outright surrender on the government and the 98.5 per cent majority of Canadians.