In the 1970s, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau selected dirigiste Quebecker Marc Lalonde as his Finance Minister, the acid-tongued Conservative MP John Crosbie quipped, “It is like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank”. The same could be said of putting Wilson-Raybould anywhere near power in Ottawa. In the summer of 2017, she announced 10 principles that would guide her government’s “reconciliation agenda.” The very first was that, “All relations with Indigenous peoples need to be based on the recognition and implementation of their right to self-determination, including the inherent right of self-government.” But if Wilson-Raybould’s first loyalty is to a nation or nations other than Canada, how could she fairly represent Canada in its relations with those nations, whose leaders are openly seeking to implement an independent “nation-to-nation” arrangement with the federal government?

Under the circumstances, perhaps it was inevitable that Wilson-Raybould would find herself at loggerheads with Trudeau, despite his slavish rhetoric about the need for “reconciliation” with Indigenous people, which he described as his government’s top priority. For, when push came to shove between Liberal political objectives in vote-rich Quebec and the Indigenous Justice minister who stood in the way, Trudeau’s true priorities were revealed.

But it may go far deeper than that. According to Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council (effectively, Canada’s top-most bureaucrat), during his first appearance at the Justice Committee, the estrangement between Wilson-Raybould and the Trudeau government was triggered months earlier. The cause was Trudeau’s showpiece Indigenous policy initiative, the so-called “rights and recognition framework”, unveiled by the prime minister himself in a speech to Parliament on February 14, 2018.

This was a plan to expand and apply Indigenous rights asserted in Section 35 of the Constitution to all laws and functions of the government. Section 35 was a contentious last-minute addition to the Constitution Act, 1982, specifically limited (mainly at the insistence of then-Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed) to “existing” aboriginal rights. Canada’s courts, and governments, have shown little deference to this caveat ever since, and Indigenous rights have expanded exponentially.

Trudeau’s promised “framework”, unveiled in February 2018, would go much farther still, making all Canadian law compliant with Section 35. This would satisfy a long-standing demand by Indigenous rights activists. It would also ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, giving every Canadian First Nation the right to be consulted over any proposed new Canadian legislation. Moreover, if enacted, this law could expand the only recently won aboriginal veto over resource development on or near Indian reserves or claimed “traditional territories”, to virtually any significant development of any kind, anywhere.

This was still not good enough for the AFN and its allies, who were mostly critical of the document. A critique published by Ryerson University’s Yellowhead Institute last June complained that it offered a “narrow model of self-government outside of the Indian Act, premised on devolution of program and service delivery, fiscal mechanisms that do not address land rights but focus on accountability, a piecemeal approach to Aboriginal title, and an ongoing neglect of treaty obligations or expansive First Nation jurisdiction generally.”

Be that as it may, somewhere along the way it seems Trudeau began to get cold feet. He may have been advised how profoundly destabilizing the legislation would be. Economic development and growth would be largely dictated by the country’s 600-odd First Nations. Not all of Trudeau’s cabinet apparently wanted to charge headlong down this road. The dispute took place largely in the confidential settings of cabinet deliberations and senior bureaucratic discussions. But it burst into the open during a speech by Wilson-Raybould at the University of Saskatchewan last September 18. In a thinly veiled attack on a framework discussion paper issued by the office of Indigenous Services Minister Carolyn Bennett, Wilson-Raybould declared that “…words are also easy, cheap…too often we see the tendency – especially in politics – to use important words that have real meaning and importance, carelessly…We see ‘recognition’ applied to words that actually mean ‘denial’. We see ‘self government’ used to apply to ideas or processes that actually maintain control over others.” Wilson-Raybould was effectively channelling complaints levelled by the AFN, some of whose chiefs had publicly demanded that Wilson-Raybould take over the file.

Also at his first Justice Committee appearance, Wernick testified that a meeting between Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould only one day before the University of Saskatchewan speech, which she had claimed was focused on SNC-Lavalin, was, in fact, called mainly to discuss her “very serious policy differences” with Bennett and other ministers over the Section 35 plan. At this meeting, Trudeau announced the bill would have to wait until after the next election. Instead, the federal government would proceed with Indigenous languages legislation.

It would be surprising if Wilson-Raybould did not feel let down or even betrayed. If she capitulated, she risked the ire of the AFN chiefs and other captains of the so-called “Indian Industry,” perhaps including her father, long-time Indigenous political firebrand Bill Wilson. After all, his daughter as a child had been named “Puglaas” – “Born to a Noble People”. Wilson told a CBC interviewer she is “Indigenous royalty,” predestined for political greatness. The Globe and Mail reported last month that Wilson-Raybould even challenged the prime minister’s prerogative to appoint judges. No wonder the first instinct of Liberal spin doctors when Wilson-Raybould went rogue was to launch a whisper campaign about how difficult she was to work with.

The stage was set for a showdown between Wilson-Raybould and a prime minister who perhaps realized – belatedly – that his prized minister’s demands would exact far too high a price on the country. Her insistence on a “nation-to-nation” deal with Ottawa, including imposing obligations to fund 600-plus Indigenous nations in perpetuity and give them de facto command of the country’s economy, became too much even for him.

But Wilson-Raybould didn’t take no for an answer. Her last act as Justice Minister after she was informed of her demotion, as reported in the Ottawa Citizen on March 5, was to affirm her Practise Directives advising all Crown lawyers to cease adversarial arguments in all litigation involving Indigenous claims. At the end of his opening statement in his rocky second appearance before the Justice Committee last Wednesday, Wernick warned of this act’s dire consequences: “Finally, the Committee may wish to hold hearings on the Attorney General of Canada’s Directive on Civil Litigation Involving Indigenous Peoples, issued by the former Attorney General on January 11, 2019. The Directive to all Government of Canada litigators could mark a profound change in Canada’s legal landscape. However, it could be repealed or gutted at the stroke of a pen and turn to ashes. All political parties now need to be clear with Canadians on the future of this Directive.”

It’s hard not to see Wilson-Raybould’s actions as an attempt to advance the Indigenous rights framework by other means. It also looks an awful lot like an attempted weakening of the rule of law as it applies to Indigenous litigation – precisely what the government allegedly tried to do for SNC-Lavalin.

Viewed in this light, the extraordinary events of the last few weeks appear to have as much or more to do with Wilson-Raybould pressuring Trudeau’s office as with his office pressuring her. Far from being the heroic defender of the rule of law in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, she took steps to weaken the Crown’s ability to defend Canada’s interests in Indigenous rights cases and fought for implementation of the AFN’s “nation-to-nation” plan. Her evident determination to put the AFN’s agenda ahead of the government’s would certainly explain why Trudeau, senior bureaucrats and a good part of the Cabinet were so upset with her.

The Wilson-Raybould saga is far from over, much is still to be learned, the Liberal government’s fate hangs in the balance, and its battleplan to survive the onslaught – if it has one – is unclear. Whatever the true political calculus of the PMO, Trudeau cabinet and senior bureaucrats may have been, Prime Minister Trudeau and all who still support him must rue the day he invited Jody Wilson-Raybould to join his team.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired Manitoba provincial court judge (appointed in 1976, Associate Chief Judge from 1991 and Acting Chief Judge in 1993), a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Center for Public Policy and a freelance writer contributing to various newspapers and other publications.