What’s the best way to snag some one-on-one time with the prime minister in a crowd?
With a selfie, of course.
Two Dalhousie University students baited Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the prospect of a selfie photo in order to ask him some tough questions on indigenous rights.
In a video posted to Facebook, the two students, Alex Ayton and Kathleen Olds, can be seen innocently requesting a selfie photo with the prime minister at a coffee shop during Trudeau’s cross-country tour in Halifax, N.S. on Monday. The unsuspecting politician enthusiastically accepts their invitation and leans in with a camera-ready smile.
As the trio face the camera, one of the women casually asks the prime minister if he plans on implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to make good on a Liberal campaign promise.
Trudeau immediately reacts with a shocked look on his face and jumps out of the camera frame. He responds with an “absolutely, yes, for sure” as he begins to distance himself from the women. Before he moves too far, one of the students poses a follow-up question.
“Does that mean requiring consent for natural resource projects?” she asks.
The prime minister had already started to greet others in the crowd, but turns to face their camera again.
“Absolutely, we need to engage with a broad range of voices and as we’ve seen the Indigenous communities have positions on both sides of just about every different project,” Trudeau said.
The short video was posted to the Facebook page of Divest Dal, an environmental group urging Dalhousie University to divest its investments in the fossil fuel industry, with the caption: “Thanks for the selfie, Justin! We'll hold you to your promise.”
The two students were split on whether the prime minister’s response was sufficient. In an interview with CTV News Channel on Wednesday. Ayton said she was “satisfied” by the comments, but Olds said she’ll be watching for Trudeau to stick by his word.
“It was very nice words and I’m very glad to hear he’s planning on implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, but we won’t really be satisfied until we see action,” she said.
The pair say their plan to confront Trudeau was a spur-of-the-moment decision after learning about his visit earlier that day. Olds said that Trudeau’s lack of transparent answers to tough questions during his cross-Canada tour was part of the reason they wanted to catch him off guard.
“We’d been looking at the town halls he’d been doing before, and we just felt like a lot of his responses were very scripted. So we were hoping that by talking to him like this, very one-on-one, we’d be able to get something more honest,” she said.
The Liberals campaigned on improving relations with Canada’s indigenous populations, but have appeared to move way from some of those pledges in the past year. Despite the promise to adopt UNDRIP, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould announced in September 2016 that the government couldn’t simply incorporate the declaration “word for word” into law.
“The hard and sometimes painful truth is that many of our current realities do not align with the standards of the United Nations declaration, and as such they must be systemically and coherently dismantled," she said.
Additionally, the Trudeau government approved the expansion of the controversial Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline in November 2016, which some indigenous communities opposed. The Liberals had pledged to obtain prior approval from indigenous populations for natural resource projects on their land.
With files from The Canadian Press
