Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is kicking off the third leg of his national town hall tour tonight in St. Catharines, Ont., where he will take unvetted questions from Canadians.
Tonight’s event is being held at Brock University at 7 p.m. ET. CBC.ca will be carrying the event live.
Trudeau faced some tough questions and some angry members of the public during his first two town halls of the year in Kamloops, B.C., and Regina.
One of the most contentious issues in Kamloops last Wednesday proved to be the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, with some in attendance adamantly supporting the pipeline because of the jobs it could create, and others opposing it for environmental reasons.
Arnie Jack from the Shuswap nation in the B.C. Interior confronted Trudeau about RCMP actions in northern B.C., saying that without the consent of the people, the prime minister would have to “go through us first.”
The previous day, RCMP officers entered the first of two blockades in northern B.C to enforce a court injunction granting workers with the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project access to a road and bridge.
The officers arrested 14 people. Later, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and RCMP reached a tentative agreement allowing workers access to the pipeline, but not before Trudeau had to face some tough questions about the standoff.
“You can stand up all the elected chiefs that you want and say that you have consent, but you do not have consent from the people on the ground, and you said yourself that these major projects would not be approved without community consent,” Jack said.
Trudeau responded to Jack by saying there are a broad range of Indigenous perspectives regarding the project.
“We are going to have to work together,” he said, amid heckles from the crowd. “I understand your frustration.”
After Kamloops, the prime minister moved his roadshow to the University of Regina.
Pipelines and Indigenous issues
Courtland Klein, 38, who works at the Evraz steel fabrication plant in Regina, was critical of the lack of progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline.
“You’ve got yourself in a hell of a predicament,” he told the prime minister. “You pissed off the Greens, you pissed off your base, you pissed off us that don’t like you and the pipeline still isn’t in the ground.
“You can legalize marijuana, but we can’t twin a pipeline, an existing pipeline to the coast.”
The Regina crowd grew more animated when Trudeau took a question from a man who said Islam and Christianity don’t mix and demanded to know what the prime minister was planning to do about the tens of thousands of people who had crossed the border illegally in search of asylum in the last year.
Trudeau said there is no open border and defended Canada’s immigration system as effective at both allowing people into the country and integrating them into society. He pointed to the success of Syrian refugees as an example.
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