RUBENSTEIN: Who exactly is Randy Boissonault?

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public PolicyPretendianism — pretending to be an Indian for fame and fortune — a fraudulent practice that has been around for generations, has exploded in popularity in the past few decades.The most recent example involves questions about federal Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault arising from a four-part investigative exposé by the National Post.It all began with a November 7 story showing that a company that belonged to Boissonnault said it was indigenous-owned while bidding on federal contracts favouring indigenous-owned suppliers. “Global Health is a wholly owned indigenous and LGBTQ Company,” said Boissonnault’s former business partner, Stephen Anderson, in a June 2020 bid by Global Health Imports Corporation (GHI) for a contract to supply face masks.Neither Boissonnault nor Anderson answered National Post’s questions about which First Nations, Métis or Inuit groups they belonged to.The new information about GHI’s bids coincides with parliamentary hearings examining federal procurement from indigenous suppliers through the Procurement Strategy for Indigenous Business (PSIB) program. The inquiry launched after a Global News report described methods that non-indigenous businesses allegedly use to access the PSIB.The stakes are high. According to government figures, in 2022 the programme helped participants land $1.6 billion in contracts.Shannin Metatawabin, CEO of the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association (NACCA,) an advocacy organization representing indigenous financial institutions, said whether or not a bid succeeds, “You’re harming the community by taking that opportunity away,” he said. “Whether it’s food out of their mouths and social impact on the community or a job.”Boissonnault’s self-identification has shifted dramatically over the years.During his first term as an MP, Boissonnault was among nine MPs in the Liberal Party’s indigenous caucus, starting in 2016.In a statement last week however, Boissonnault’s spokesperson, Alice Hansen, said he joined the caucus as an “ally” because he is not a member of an indigenous community. However, the Liberal party’s website described its Indigenous caucus as consisting “of MPs who are First Nation, Métis and Inuit nations” and who “represent a broad cross section of who Indigenous people are.”Hansen did not reply to the National Post’s questions about whether the minister’s understanding of his heritage had changed and if so, why.However a year earlier, his name had not been included in a Liberal party press release identifying the eight indigenous Liberals who won their seats in the September 2015 federal election.In 2017, Boissonault told The Canadian Press that he was “non-status adoptive Cree,” a heritage traced back to a maternal great-grandmother in the family that adopted him. He mentioned his great-grandmother in Parliament at least five times before he was voted out in the 2019 election.After Boissonnault won the Edmonton Centre seat in 2021, he was no longer listed as a member of the Liberal Indigenous Caucus.In 2021, he told Xtra, an online LGBTQ magazine, that he was “a white, cisgender member of the community.”Boissonnault’s office recently referred National Post to Chadwick Cowie, the indigenous researcher who Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault’s office says explained to him that he was “non-status adopted Cree,” after questions emerged about the minister’s shifting claims about his indigenous identity.Cowie is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Nation as part of the community of Hiawatha First Nation, says he did not give the Edmonton MP that term.“I would have worded it differently,” he claimed. “I would have said that he was adopted to a family that had Cree lineage.”According to Cowie, after Boissonnault told him he had a Cree great-grandmother, he informed him that it was more realistic that he was someone who had non-status Cree lineage.“I thought that was his biological great-grandmother,” said Cowie. “I misunderstood probably… that he was (a) descendant of someone who had been adopted out, not that he was adopted into a family that had Indigenous lineage.”The term “adopted” in this context generally refers to someone adopted by an indigenous community as a member noted Cowie, regardless of their status or membership as observed by the government. “The adoptive thing makes it sound like he is, you know, (Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond), or he is Buffy Sainte-Marie,” said Cowie, referring to other well-known Canadians who have had their indigenous heritage claims questioned.In addition, the president of the Metis nation that Boissonnault recently claimed members of his adoptive family have joined, noted that the MP would likely not qualify for citizenship under its rules.Faced with this push back, on November 15 Boissonnault apologized for not having been “clear” about his family’s links to indigenous ancestry as he now says he should have been. He also said, “I have never claimed indigenous status,” again begging the questions of why the Liberals listed him as part of a group of indigenous MPs for years and why Boissonnault embraced this misrepresentation.Conservatives and New Democrats continue to insist Boissonnault must answer questions about why a company that belonged to him said it was indigenous-owned while bidding on federal contracts.“It’s highly suspicious at best. But at worst, it’s fraud,” Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett told the Commons ethics committee on November 7. His colleague Michael Cooper said Boissonneault has “no place sitting in cabinet.”Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre joined a growing chorus of voices calling for Boissonnault to resign on November 15 when he opined, “Fake indigenous Liberal minister makes a fake apology after getting caught making up fake stories about his heritage to get contracts from a government of which he is a minister.”According to an August 9 Blacklock’s Reporter story, contractors pretending to be indigenous to obtain highly lucrative federal work are “of great concern” to Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein: “If it truly is fraud, then it becomes a criminal offence.”On March 7, 2024, the Department of Indigenous Services said it was verifying the status of all contractors claiming to be indigenous. Authorities set aside five percent of contracts for suppliers mostly owned by indigenous shareholders. Some 2,600 companies are listed in a federal Indigenous Business Directory.Though she doesn’t acknowledge the effects of such legislation, Jean Teillet, the great grand-niece of Louis Riel and an indigenous rights lawyer, believes “thousands of individual Canadians have falsely assumed an Indigenous identity.”“Perhaps the greatest harm of all [caused by pretendianism] is the sense of suspicion that now prevails and the loss of trust. Fraud is a poison, and it taints everything it touches. Indigenous identity fraudsters make a mockery of truth and ethical standards. We should care deeply about Indigenous identity fraud and every measure should be taken to put a stop to it.“They’re taking that opportunity from a real Indigenous person. It’s prestige, it’s money, it’s grants and awards and positions and work that they would never have gotten otherwise. It’s identity theft, it causes harm, there’s a lot of it going on, and it’s a serious problem. And that will happen because thousands of individual Canadians have falsely assumed an Indigenous identity,” she claimed.“Thousands” is a big but not unexpected number given that self-identification is all that’s still required in most cases to reap the advantages of aboriginal status.But for most Canadians, “the greatest harm of all” is the sense of suspicion that now prevails and the loss of trust” when the country’s citizens are granted or denied all manner of scarce benefits and resources based on the colour of their skin or their ethnic affiliation. Moreover, it is an incontrovertible logical and observable fact that favouring some people for their identity automatically disfavours others with a different identity. Even among indigenous people themselves, differentially rewarding already privileged people results in fewer rewards available for currently disadvantaged ones.So, why is all this Pretendianism taking place?It is because of the entrenchment in 1982 of special indigenous and treaty rights in Sections 25 and 35 of the Canadian Constitution, rights expansively interpreted by the courts, thereby encouraging the growth of indigenous identity theft by non-aboriginals eager to take advantage of the growing power, prestige, privilege, and prosperity faking Indian pedigree now yields.Still, most Canadians generally reject differential access to limited social and economic assets based on being born with a particular racial or ethnic identity, in this case the inherited right to a myriad of unearned benefits in what is supposed to be a nation based on freedom, fairness, and equality of opportunity.Ironically but unsurprisingly, indigenous identity theft is superficially the other side of the tarnished racial-cum-ethnic differentiation coin: for most of the long period of contact between the first settlers of the New World and the later European immigrants, pretending not to be indigenous, like passing for white in America among pale-skinned African Americans, was an important strategy for coping with the racism of the day.And it is superficial, because those passing for indigenous these days are, for the most part, already privileged for other reasons such as having advanced education or influential parents.Whose fault is all this identity theft? Those who have gotten away with it, of course. But the godfather of this reprehensible practice is none other than former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who put it in fast forward when he blithely helped entrench special indigenous and treaty rights and privileges in our sacred constitution.To paraphrase Teillet, for the good of all Canadians we should take every measure to put a stop to this unsavoury practice.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report, a retired professor of anthropology, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Who exactly is Randy Boissonault?

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