Trudeau vows to mend Canada’s ‘broken’ relationship with Aboriginal Peoples – Montreal Gazette
August 13, 2015
A middle-aged woman stumbles out of the Great Northern Pub and into the blistering August heat.
She walks through the parking lot, turns around and focuses on a large man at the bar’s entrance.
“You touch me and I’ll call the cops,” she says, slurring her words. “Look at you, you look like a gorilla!” It’s just before 3 p.m. on a Wednesday in La Ronge – a northern Saskatchewan village that sits in one of the poorest federal ridings in Canada.
Just a few hours before the incident outside the pub, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau landed in the remote community to tour the swaths of forest that were consumed by wildfire last month. The fire came within a few hundred metres of downtown La Ronge, displaced thousands of First Nations people but stopped before the power lines at Highway 107.
In a moment of pure political theatre, Trudeau walked along the ash-covered heaps with veteran Saskatchewan MP Ralph Goodale and local leaders, promising them a national forest fire strategy to avoid future tragedies.
