1 on 1 With Ian Lafreniere, Quebec’s New Indigenous Affairs Minister
Written by Paul Graif on 19 October 2020
Ian Lafreniere is the new Minister Responsible for Indigenous Affairs for the CAQ Government. He was the guest on the Partyline Talk show today on K1037. News Director Paul Graif’s first question to the newly minted minister was: do you have any steps in mind to improve relations with the Indigenous communities?
“I reached all the Chiefs and the Grand Chiefs and established a very important communication link, they all got my personal cell phone number and I think this is the beginning of it. Having a straight and forward conversation, being able to talk about all the topics that are important so that was the first step. Secondly, I’m doing a few meetings with a few Chiefs and Grand Chiefs, as a matter of fact I’ll be in Oka in about a week from now. Covid is extremely complicated for me because I would loved to reach everyone in-person face-to-face, but as you can imagine that jeopardized my plan now because of Covid, I don’t want to be the person to bring up the pandemic in different regions, so unfortunately I’ve got to stick to teams and Zoom but believe me I’m establishing a strong communication.”
As for his plan, Minister Lafreniere says there’s been a lot of misunderstanding in society that needs to be addressed:
“We’re talking about training, but it’s an on-going process: there’s a lot of misunderstanding. I realize that in the general population there’s such a lot of misunderstanding, we live together on the same land but we don’t know each other enough and that’s the reason why I think this is one of my important jobs, my important goal, to make the different communities that we have in Quebec, we’ve got eleven Nations with 55 communities: I need to bring up more attention about what’s going on, reality and topics.”
