A Reporter, a Hotel Bar, and the End of My Illusions About Trudeau

A photo I took of Trudeau at his honouring ceremony in Tsuu T’ina Nation one day after the encounter.

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-Love Brandi xoxo

A Note Before We Begin

I’ve been sitting with this story for almost a decade.

I wrote it down once, and then I went quiet. Partly out of caution. Partly because I wasn’t sure the world was ready to receive it the way it deserved to be received.

But here we are in 2026, and something has shifted.

Trudeau is no longer Prime Minister. The political chapter he represented — the one wrapped in the language of hope, reconciliation, and progressive promise — has closed. And yet the conditions that made his betrayal possible haven’t gone anywhere. If anything, they feel more entrenched. More brazen. The gap between what leaders say and what they do has never felt wider. The distrust so many people are carrying right now — toward governments, toward institutions, toward the carefully managed image of power — is not paranoia. It is earned.

This story is about one night in Vancouver in March 2016. It’s about what I overheard, what I chose to do with it, and what it cost me to carry it. But more than that, it’s about something I’ve come to understand slowly and painfully in the years since: that things are rarely as they seem. That the performance of justice and the pursuit of it are two very different things. And that for Indigenous peoples in this country, the distance between those two things has always been measured in generations.

Reconciliation is not a chapter that got written under Trudeau and left unfinished. It is a wound that keeps being opened by the same hands that claim to be healing it.

I’m telling you this story now because I think you need to hear it. And honestly — I think I finally need to say it out loud.

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Clad in a hoodie and sweatpants, I made my way downstairs from my room in one of the fanciest hotels in Vancouver. The Pan Pacific is the kind of place that draws connoisseurs in tailored suits — towering pillars, marble walkways, ceiling-to-floor windows framing stunning views of the ocean waterfront and snow-capped mountains.

It reeks of luxury and privilege. On a staff writer’s salary, I normally wouldn’t have the means to stay somewhere like this. But I was sharing a room with two friends who’d traveled to Vancouver to support First Nations chiefs attending a highly anticipated First Ministers’ Meeting with newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The meeting coincided with an international gathering on climate change, and Trudeau had promised to sit down with the chiefs to address the growing threats of global warming to their communities. It was early March 2016. The night before the meeting, chiefs who had descended from all corners of the country gathered to hash out a plan — a collective message to deliver to the new Prime Minister.

This was a big deal.

Trudeau had swept his party to victory the previous October, igniting a firestorm of support from Indigenous voters. The charismatic Liberal leader had made dazzling promises about advancing reconciliation and forging a new path forward with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. His campaign birthed the Rock the Indigenous Vote movement, which brought thousands of Indigenous voters to the polls for the first time. I was a correspondent for APTN National News and had covered the election from the Tsuu T’ina Nation near Calgary that fall. The hope in the air was palpable. For the first time in a long time, Indigenous peoples believed there was a real chance the chronically troubled relationship with the federal government could be mended — that the jarring inequities in poverty, education funding, healthcare, infrastructure, and the overwhelming violence against Indigenous women and girls would finally be addressed.

This was the first major meeting between the First Nations chiefs and Trudeau since he’d been sworn in.

It ended in disaster.

Some of the First Nation leaders address the media following the failed First Ministers Meeting, March 2016. Photo by Yours Truly.

I was standing outside the meeting room when the chiefs came storming out. Among them was Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam — a straight-talking, passionate leader whose community of Fort Chipewyan sits downstream of Canada’s largest carbon-emitting industrial project: the Alberta oil sands. Fort Chipewyan had been battling the impacts of pollution and toxins leaking into their water system for decades, but to Canada, the economic benefits of the oil sands consistently outweigh the havoc it unleashes on the people who live in its shadow. Chief Adam was fuming. He told the media he would be taking the government to court over what had just unfolded inside that room.

He described how the chiefs had been given no real opportunity to speak — that it was Trudeau who dictated how the meeting would go. The once-celebrated Prime Minister, it seemed, was already falling back on the same old tactics of paternalism and negligence that had defined Ottawa’s relationship with First Nations for generations.

I ran to my hotel room to file a story back to my editor while my friends went to dinner. When I finished a few hours later, I was exhausted and hungry. I’d already changed out of my formal outfit and into sweats before writing, but I thought I’d steal a moment to unwind — some food, some tea, the restaurant downstairs.

One side of the pub-style restaurant buzzed with delegates and hotel guests drinking and picking at hors d’oeuvres. But around the back of the circular bar at the other open entrance it was quiet, and I found a spot to breathe. I was working through a plate of hot wings and scrolling through my social media feed when I heard a familiar voice behind me. Before I could fully turn around, a man in a suit brushed past my arm and lunged toward his waiting companion — flanked by two large men in sunglasses, suits, looking like they’d stepped out of Men in Black. It was Trudeau, theatrically greeting someone at a table barely ten feet from mine.

A screenshot of my tweet that night. Of course, I didn’t include everything I overheard…until now.

I was struck by the sheer casualness of it. The Prime Minister, right here, in the low-lit back corner of a hotel pub. Being the reporter I am, I reached for my phone to take a few pictures. When I stood up to snap them, one of his security guards moved to wave me off. I told him I was a reporter and we were in a public space.

“Ya, we know who you are,” one of them said, nodding at me.

Right — all journalists attending the event had been vetted and approved by the government beforehand. That’s how they knew. But I wasn’t about to let some government security detail push me around. I snapped my pictures, sat back down, and tried to act like this kind of thing happened every day. In my world, it certainly didn’t.

Then I started to overhear the conversation.

And my heart leapt into my throat.

Trudeau was laughing. Loudly, freely, without any apparent concern for who might be listening. He was laughing about the meeting with the chiefs — the meeting that had ended in collective outrage just hours earlier. He was mocking Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde. Cackling about how he’d put Bellegarde in his place.

Rookie reporter Brandi (left). Covering the First Ministers Meeting and climate conference, Vancouver, March 2016.

The rose-colored glasses I’d been wearing — the ones so many of us had put on with such hope — began to dissolve right there over my half-eaten plate of hot wings.

I felt gutted. Was this real? Was this the Prime Minister that so many Indigenous people had prayed for, believed in, voted for in historic numbers — the man who was supposed to be different? And it was all a performance? For show? For votes?

I quietly texted my APTN colleague, a seasoned investigative journalist, and told him what was happening. I’d already started recording on my phone. He told me to take notes. He was intrigued, and said I should write something and have APTN publish it in the morning.

A wave of overwhelm crashed over me.

Who would believe a relatively new reporter — Indigenous, at that — claiming that Trudeau had been caught backstabbing and mocking First Nations leaders in a hotel bar? That his vows of reconciliation were nothing more than theater?

I texted my friends — sharp, politically connected Cree women who understood the landscape better than almost anyone — and told them to get back to the hotel immediately. Within about fifteen minutes they arrived, along with prominent Chief Matthew Coon Come, who had served as Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec for decades. We pulled together at an adjoining table and spoke in low voices. They were shocked. Disappointed. But also cautious.

What should I do? I asked. Should I go public? What were the stakes?

Their answer was measured and somber. Going public could be dangerous, they said. I could be targeted. My safety could be at risk. It wasn’t worth it.

Meanwhile, my APTN colleague’s texts kept coming — encouraging me, urging me to write the story.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My heart felt like a train barreling down a track with no clear destination. I was running on empty after days of reporting on the ground, but sleep wouldn’t come.

At 5 a.m., my phone buzzed again. My colleague, asking what I’d decided. I was already packing my suitcase — I had a flight to Calgary that day, where, in an almost surreal twist, Trudeau was being honored by chiefs in an elaborate ceremony.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the gray morning quiet and let that irony sink in.

None of it was real. Not his words, not his promises, not the allyship he’d performed so convincingly on the campaign trail. It was a game. A calculated play for the trust of a people who had already been betrayed, repeatedly, since the founding of what is called Canada — leveraged for votes and reputation, and then discarded the moment it was no longer convenient.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t expose him based on one encounter, as plainly damning as it was. I told my colleague I wasn’t comfortable with it. I told him to let it go.

In the meantime, my Cree friends had quietly reached out to contacts connected to people inside Trudeau’s circle. And the word that came back to me was stark: they knew. Word had traveled overnight. Trudeau’s people were aware that a reporter had overheard him.

I felt a chill I couldn’t shake.

A day later, I noticed that one of my tweets had been liked by Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford. She hadn’t been following me. She had no obvious reason to know I existed. The timing was too precise to be accidental. To me, it was a message: we see you.

It was unsettling in a way that lodged itself somewhere deep.

I wrestled with what I’d witnessed for a long time afterward — heartsick that Trudeau had played the role of betrayer just as fluently as his predecessors. Whatever I had believed about the possibility of genuine reconciliation felt irrevocably altered.

But I didn’t fully understand it yet: this moment was a prologue.

It was a warning — a first lesson in what it would mean to report from the front lines of Indigenous resistance, where colonial authorities don’t just ignore the truth. They come for the people telling it.

I would soon find myself embedded in intense, high-stakes conflicts between Indigenous nations and the governments determined to violate their rights and sovereignty. My work became more than bearing witness and getting information to the public. It became a constant battle against the distorted mainstream narrative pushed by those in power — and an insistence on centering the voices of our own people.

For that, I would be threatened. Surveilled. Vilified. Criminalized by government agencies and police forces that wanted me silent.

Years later, after it all came to a head with my arrest and criminal charges, I would face the most agonizing decision of my life: relent and walk away, or stand firm and keep fighting for the truth to be told.