More than a year before the 2015 election, which delivered a Liberal majority government, I had dinner in Ottawa with Gerald Butts, a confidant of Justin Trudeau. I did not know Butts well, our previous contact having been several lunches in Toronto when he had worked for Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. Until he left the Prime Minister’s Office, in February 2019, I didn’t speak to or hear from Butts after that evening — except once.
I cannot remember all the details of our conversation. I assume it rambled through the usual subjects between political adviser and journalist: policy, personalities, strategies. The Liberals were then in third place in the polls. I do recall, however, that we chewed over and agreed on the premise that Parliament and the country would be well served by having more Indigenous candidates running and winning seats, both to bring their perspective more evidently into national debates and to demonstrate that the political system was not...
Jeffrey Simpson was the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist for thirty-two years.
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