Harper’s spectre haunts Trudeau

Massive, lethal blind spot for Liberals

The choice for Canadians now seems as stark as the first question put to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at his Wednesday night press conference in Montreal: Should Canadians believe Jody Wilson-raybould’s account of “a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with SNCLavalin,” or should they believe Trudeau’s insistence that he and his staff “always acted appropriately and professionally”?

If only because we have a hugely detailed account from Wilson-raybould, and a perfunctory denial from Trudeau, not to mention the sudden resignation of his principal secretary Gerald Butts, it seems likely the former justice minister and attorney general — the first Indigenous woman to hold the positions, as we were so often told — will win that showdown. The question then becomes: Does it matter?

Many partisan Liberals publicly took note of WilsonRaybould’s opinion that the pressure exerted upon her had not been illegal — just inappropriate. That’s nothing for Trudeau to hang his hat on. But if “appropriate and professional” was ever the minimum threshold for reelection in this country, “not guilty” long ago replaced it. Clearly there is some despair among partisan Liberals who actually bought Trudeau’s doing-politics-differently shtick. But veteran partisans had already downshifted their reelection pitch from “utopia awaits” to “it’s him or Andrew Scheer, who’s just Stephen Harper in disguise.”

One of Wilson-raybould’s most telling recollections concerned Butts’ alleged efforts to get her on board with the DPA, in a meeting at the Château Laurier. She said she refused. It would be especially inappropriate, she said she argued, considering Lavalin had already applied for a judicial review of the independent Director of Public Prosecution’s (DPP) decision not to offer such an agreement.

At this point, she said, Butts changed course. “Gerry talked to me about how the statute was … passed by Harper and that he does not like the law,” said Wilson-raybould, referring to the 2006 Director of Public Prosecutions Act. “I said something like ‘that is the law that we have.’”

It’s quite a picture: The PM’S principal secretary, increasingly exasperated by the attorney general’s quaint insistence upon prosecutorial independence, reminds her that the rules they’re playing under were designed by the dark lord himself — as if the mere invocation of Harper’s accursed name might change her mind.

Wilson-raybould’s answer — the law is the law — was a pretty good one. She’s a lawyer, after all. Had she been inclined toward a more thorough analysis, she might have reminded Butts of how the DPP came into being. Harper first seems to have mooted the idea on the campaign trail in 2005, amidst the Liberals’ final meltdown. Jean Chrétien had asked the Federal Court to quash the Gomery Inquiry’s findings with respect to his role in the sponsorship scandal; Paul Martin was left gibbering, supporting Chrétien’s right to appeal while standing four-square and contritely behind Gomery’s findings.

Famously, the Liberals did not win that election. “The days of kickback schemes and envelopes stuffed with cash are over,” Treasury Board president John Baird crowed the next year as he introduced the Federal Accountability Act, which created the DPP.

Thirteen years later, Trudeau’s right-hand man al- legedly thought it was a good idea to go a-meddling in the DPP’S business to protect a company accused of cartoonish corruption in Libya, and that admitted to over $100,000 in illegal donations to the Liberal party, riding associations and leadership candidates between 2004 and 2011. Why? By WilsonRaybould’s account: because there was an election coming up in Quebec, because Lavalin might decamp from Montreal to London, because the PM’S seat is in Quebec, and because “we can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected,” as Wilson-raybould said the PMO told her chief of staff.

Oh, yes, and jobs. Mostly jobs!

It speaks of a massive, lethal blind spot that never seems to go away: So often, Trudeau’s Liberals confuse not being Conservatives, not being led by Stephen Harper, with virtue. At his Wednesday press conference, Trudeau set out to enumerate some of the “great things that we’ve accomplished together as a team on the justice file.” He pointed first to medical assistance in dying — fair dues, though as with so many advances the Liberals claim as their own, it came at the Supreme Court’s behest. He pointed second to legalizing marijuana — a surprising and positive development, certainly, though it came with outrageously intrusive impaired driving legislation that is sure to be abused by police until the courts find it unconstitutional. And finally pointed to “progressive reforms around criminal justice and sentencing.”

Oof. Ask any justice reform advocate if he thinks the Liberals have lived up to their promises. You’ll get an earful.

Self-congratulation out of the way, Trudeau reminded Canadians twice that the choice they face next year is between him and his Liberals and what is “still very much the party of Stephen Harper.” You would think they had won by 20 points, that Harper was in miserable exile. They won by 7½ points. The spectre of Harper does not terrify most normal Canadians; nor that of Prime Minister Andrew Scheer. In the long term, it’s likely good news for Trudeau that at least some of his MPS still seem intent on aiming higher than the inherent righteousness of being Liberals in government. In the short term, however, one of them is being a total pain in the neck.