UPDATE: Some guy is apparently Seamus O’Regan.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has named a former television personality as the country’s new Indigenous Services Minister. Seamus O’Regan was sworn in during an elaborate cabinet shuffling ceremony on Monday morning.
O’Regan replaces Jane Philpott, who is now doing something with money or something.
“Yeah, this is okay,” O’Regan told reporters. “Bigger office
— oh and perks like clean water, some health care.”
Wilson-Raybould out
Jody Wilson-Raybould was also shuffled out, moving from Justice to Veterans Affairs. Relieved, Wilson-Raybould marked the occasion by leaving Rideau Hall, where the cabinet shuffle took place, and jaywalking across the street.
“I’m free from the chains of this country’s laws,” she said. “Free, I tell you.”
A spokesperson from the Prime Minister’s Office said Wilson-Raybould’s move had nothing to do with a recent RCMP raid on a camp set up by Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs over a pipeline and everything to do with ‘Indigenous people just being nomadic, I guess.’
Elaborate ceremony, ghosts
During the cabinet shuffling ceremony, O’Regan was seized by Parliamentary aides who forced him to kneel in front of a statue of the country’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald.
“Humble yourself before the Father of Indigenous Services,” Trudeau told O’Regan. “And when you arise, it is as a Minister…and my child.”
The statue, said to be a vessel for the ghost of Macdonald, delivered O’Regan’s mandate in a voice witnessed described as sounding like the fictional character Arnold Horshack from television show Welcome Back Kotter.
The Sister
Also part of the ceremony was a bonding ritual performed by Sister Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Carolyn Bennett who embraced her new counterpart, before drawing an ancient dagger and drawing it across her own hand.
Once blood flowed, Bennett did the same to O’Regan and the two clasped hands
— holding them together while reciting a sacrosanct spell in Sumerian.
“Now we are bound by blood and cabinet,” Bennett told O’Regan, who wept openly. “Until death or election tear us apart.”
Wiping tears from his face, O’Regan told reporters he looked forward to upholding the department’s most sacred traditions, like grossly underfunding First Nations children in court and fighting them in court when they demand better.
