Canada’s employment minister resigns after shifting his claims of Indigenous ancestry

Canada’s employment minister has resigned from the cabinet after weeks of scrutiny over his business dealings and his shifting claims of Indigenous ancestry.

Moments before 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”.

Boissonnault’s claims to Indigenous identity were the subject of an investigation by the 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.

Boissonnault, the minister for employment, workforce development and official languages, blamed his former business partner and denied any knowledge of the claims.

The Alberta lawmaker never explicitly said he was Indigenous but often described himself as “non-status adopted Cree”. He also spoke often 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 Boissonnault would speak a few words in Cree when making funding announcements for the governing Liberal party.

“That is Cree for: ‘Guests you’re welcome, there’s room here,’” Boissonnault told an Edmonton crowd in 2019. “And if my great-grandmother, full-blooded Cree woman Lucy Brenneis were here, she may well welcome you in exactly that same way.”

Last week, Boissonnault apologized for “not being as clear as he could have been” about his heritage. Days later, Boissonnault’s office acknowledged his adoptive great-grandmother’s had Métis lineage, not Cree, after being presented with census records by the Post.

A spokesperson for the minister said his “own understanding of his family’s heritage was inaccurate”.

The revelations triggered a political row with lawmakers in the Conservative and New Democratic parties calling for his ejection from cabinet.

Earlier this week, NDP member of parliament Blake Desjarlais said Trudeau should kick Boissonnault out of the cabinet if the minister did not leave voluntarily.

“The real victims here aren’t the Liberals. The real victim isn’t Randy. The real victim is Indigenous businesses, Indigenous people that did everything right. They did all that, just to learn that the system is rigged right here at the top,” Desjarlais, who is Métis, told reporters, accusing the education minister of “pretendianism”.

Jody Wilson-Raybould, who served as Trudeau’s attorney general and justice minister wrote on social media that “we get to watch white people play ancestry wheel of fortune” and that if the prime minister was “committed to true reconciliation” then he would have ejected Boissonnault from cabinet long ago.

Separately, Boissonnault is embroiled in a scandal over whether he was improperly involved in the daily operations 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 he was the person identified in messages between his former business partner and the representative of a California-based company.

The Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett told reporters it “stretches reason and belief” that someone working for Global Health Imports was also named Randy but whose last name is unknown to Boissonnault. Earlier this summer, Conservatives recently filed a motion calling for the “other Randy” to appear at the ethics committee.