Photo credit: the New York Times
Canada’s employment minister has resigned from the cabinet after weeks of scrutiny over his business dealings and his shoplifting claims of Indigenous ancestry.
The Guardian reports that moments before the question period on Wednesday, Justin Trudeau’s office said Randy Boissonnault would “step away from cabinet effective immediately” and will “focus on clearing the allegations made against him”.
His claims to Indigenous identity were the subject of an investigation by National Post in early November, which revealed that a company he co-owned positioned itself as Indigenous-owned or “Aboriginal” while bidding on federal contracts.
He explicitly said he was Indigenous but often described himself as “non-status adopted Cree”. He often spoke about his great-grandmother as “a full-blooded” Cree woman.
In 2018, Boissonnault told a parliamentary committee that as a child, his great-grandmother told him: “We come from the land, Randy, and some day we’ll go back to the land, and the land will be all shared in the future.”
The National Post also found instances in which he would speak a few words in Cree when making funding announcements for the governing Liberal party. Last week, he apologized for “not being as clear as he could have been” about his heritage. Days later, his office acknowledged that his adoptive great-grandmother had Metis lineage, not Cree after the Post presented him with census records.
The revelation led to a political row with lawmakers in the Conservative and New Democratic parties calling for his resignation from the cabinet.
Earlier this week, NDP member of Parliament Blake Desjarlais said, “The real victims here aren’t the Liberals. The real victim isn’t Randy. The real victims are Indigenous businesses and Indigenous people who did everything right. They did all that just to learn that the system is rigged right here at the top.”
Boissonnault is also embroiled in a scandal over whether he was improperly involved in the daily operation of the PPE company Global Health Imports while serving as a cabinet member after records of text messages showed someone named “Randy” in a discussion about a wire transfer of roughly C$500,000 to secure a large shipment of nitrile gloves.
Boissonnault denied being the person identified in messages between his former business partner and a representative of a California-based company.
