THE STRANGE PHILIPPIC OF MICHAEL WERNICK

Best to avert your eyes from clerk’s ramblings

Like Michael Wernick, the clerk of the Privy Council, I am a strong believer in the traditions and the strength of our public service.

I think, for example, that most of the persons who have occupied his position as the country’s senior mandarin are intelligent, sincere and thoughtful people.

It is positively unprecedented for one to appear before a committee of the House of Commons spewing gallons of drivel and frightened non sequiturs, as Wernick did on Thursday, and I would encourage the Canadian public to regard it as a sad anomaly — the sort of personal spectacle from which we, in time, choose to politely avert our eyes.

Truly, the ordinary state of our system of government is relative serenity, managed by rational, functioning minds.

Wernick was called upon to testify to the sequence of events leading to Jody Wilson-Raybould’s startling removal from the Department of Justice, and he did so, confirming that he had participated in reminding her that recent changes to the law allowed for alternatives to prosecuting the Quebec en- gineering giant SNC-Lavalin.

He explicitly confirmed that he had approached her as a representative of the prime minister and “a lot of her colleagues” in cabinet, warning of economic chaos. He even asserted that “I am quite sure the minister felt pressured to get it right."

He sees nothing improper in any of this, but he also, perhaps sensing possible weaknesses in this position, proposes that the former attorney general ought to have consulted the ethics commissioner if she felt there was a problem.

Well, his call to WilsonRaybould took place on Dec. 19: she was bounced 26 days later, with official Ottawa still hibernating. So this is certainly information worth having as we discuss her fate, the prime minister’s subsequent reassuring boast

BUT HE WENT ON. OH, DID HE.

that her continued presence at Veterans Affairs “spoke for itself,” and her immediate resignation from cabinet.

We can only be grateful that the head of the civil service found time to mention these salient timeline points after he had completed an uninvited philippic on the contemporary state of Canadian politics. “I am deeply concerned about my country right now, and its politics, and where it’s headed,” he bawled. “I worry about foreign interference in the upcoming election and we’re working hard on that.” Was Wernick intending to suggest that some sort of Russian brain gas had been dispersed in the ventilation sys- tem at Globe and Mail headquarters? Tempted though I am to believe it, I do not see how his apparent hypothesis was pertinent to the purpose of his appearance, except as a self-evident attempt at distraction.

But he went on. Oh, did he. He complained that protesters are often using words like “treason” and “traitor” to characterize the current government, calling these “words that lead to assassination” and moaning that “somebody is going to be shot” during the upcoming federal campaign. One can only wonder what cave Mr. Wernick was occupying at the time of the 1988 general election on free trade, or whether he has ever read any of the words written on the posters of climate protesters. I myself found last week’s Alberta- to- Ottawa truck

convoy protest sort of ridiculous, but now, having been presented with evidence that it has plunged Canadian establishment lifers into a state of bug- eyed pantomime horror, I suppose there might be something to the tactic after all.

Not content with making me feel warmly toward the Globe and Mail and to protest theatrics, Wernick went on to denounce “the vomitorium of social media,” notifying us by his misuse of Latin that classical education is one tradition of our civil service that we may have let slip at our peril. Wernick, you see, is worried “about the reputations of honourable people who have served their country being besmirched and dragged through the market square."

This civil servant’s use of the market to denote a locus of evil must, I suppose, be overlooked. And I must assume that Mr. Wernick is every bit as concerned with Jody Wilson- Raybould ’ s reputation as he is with anybody else’s. The appearance of a disagreement between herself and the prime minister is impossible to overlook, as is the resignation of the PM’s principal secretary.

What I find objectionable is Wernick’s creepy attempt to persuade the people of Canada that if recent events have made them doubt our institutions of government — “lose faith” in them was his phrase — it is the people, and not the government, that must be the problem. Indeed, Wernick suggests they are probably suffering from delusions spread by sinister foreigners on social media. It seems puzzling that a man should denounce the careless use of words such as “treason” and “traitor” in the very moment he is pouring paranoid xenophobia into the nearest camera-hole.

This does not, in fact, encourage faith in Canadian government — but then, the very idea that government is an appropriate object of faith, as opposed to careful scrutiny and eternal skepticism, is stupid. And I am confident in saying that it will be greeted as stupid, in all zones and corners of the political spectrum, outside Ottawa; and it would certainly be a stupid basis on which to operate a Loyal Opposition, or a newspaper, or the citizen’s privilege of voting.