On the day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally removed Jody Wilson-Raybould as justice minister and attorney general, she approached her successor at the cabinet swearing-in ceremony to deliver a cryptic warning.

First, she congratulated David Lametti on his new role and offered her assistance in the transition.

“Then, purposefully, with (Privy Council Clerk) Michael Wernick standing within earshot, I offered Lametti a warning: ‘Be careful, all is not what it seems,'” Wilson-Raybould writes in her new book, Indian in the Cabinet. “I looked directly at the clerk when I said it. Lametti replied, ‘Noted’.”

Wilson-Raybould’s book, which hits bookstore shelves this week, recounts the story of how she cautiously but optimistically entered politics, became Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, and then fought against the control exerted by Trudeau’s top staffers Gerald Butts and Katie Telford until it erupted into the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

The facts of the scandal have long been in the public record, and the book adds no explosive revelations on that front. But Wilson-Raybould says she has no regrets about how she acted, as this was not just another policy dispute.

“This is about the rule of law and the norms and core principles of our democratic system,” she writes. “So my approach to it was, of course, different. I was the attorney general, for f***’s sakes.”

The book also chronicles Wilson-Raybould’s deteriorating relationship with Trudeau. She describes a private meeting in March 2019 — after she and others had publicly testified at a Commons committee — when Trudeau asked her to commit to move on from the controversy now that both sides of the story had been aired.

“As (Trudeau) continued on, I thought and then said out loud to him: ‘I wish that I had never met you,'” she writes. “In that moment this is what I felt. I told him I was upset — to say the least — because I had actually believed him and what he said about doing politics differently.”

She says she’s mad at herself now for having once thought Trudeau is an “honest and good person, when, in truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it.”

Pushing back on the Prime Minister’s Office
Much of the book concerns Wilson-Raybould’s time as justice minister and her growing anger with the Prime Minister’s Office.

Before Wilson-Raybould had been sworn in, she was offended to learn a “long-time, well-connected Liberal” was hired to be her chief of staff without any consultation. That lasted just two months before Wilson-Raybould was able to swap in her original choice for the job, Lea Nicholas-Mackenzie, a close friend who had managed her election campaign.

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