National Post (National Edition)
A better apology is always possible
This will sound like damning with faint praise. It’s actually entirely sincere: Justin Trudeau is getting better at fessing up when he steps in it.
“I made a mistake in not recusing myself immediately from the discussions given our family’s history,” he told Canadians in a press conference on Monday. This after last week’s revelation that he had voted in cabinet to give WE Charity tens of millions of dollars to manage a contract worth almost a billion, despite the fact that WE has paid his mother and brother a combined $350,000 in speaking fees while he’s been prime minister. “And I am sincerely sorry for not having done that.”
He would have nailed it if he’d just stopped there. He didn’t, going on at some length about his commitment to youth issues and how unprecedented the pandemic is, and so on and so on.
It was typical boilerplate. But the start of the statement, at least, marked a pleasant change for a man with a well-established pattern for dealing with these kinds of ethical flubs. The PM, or mortified Liberal party colleagues, seem to have finally figured out how to compress the counterproductive period of flailing-about, flinging deflections and lame excuses to see what sticks, into mere days, instead of weeks and months.
Better was possible, after all. Will the acknowledgment of wrongdoing suffice? It may well. This is summer, after all, a time of year when scandals die. If there’s no major additional shoes that drop, this may well blow over. Further, it’s not like there aren’t other things in the news these days. There’s every chance this fades from view, or at least goes away for a while. If it does, and the ethics commissioner later rules against him, Trudeau can say, well, yeah, I already fessed up and apologized. The opposition will sputter and send out some fundraising blasts, but that’ll be the effective end of it.
That’s Trudeau’s best-case scenario. There are other ones to consider. The summer doldrums can cut both ways. With Canada seemingly doing reasonably well against COVID, this could end up being the most interesting thing for many weeks. That’ll mean more coverage, more questions, and perhaps more revelations along the way.
It might not ever blow up into something on the scale of SNCLavalin, but as written here previously, Trudeau was always going to have to contend with a transition from spend-happy emergency management into a period of consequences. Parliament won’t be out forever. He won’t be shovelling billions out the door indefinitely. As the pandemic recedes, we’ll deal with the cleanup.
That’s never been the Trudeau government’s strong suit. They’re good at the press-conferences and
CHANCE THIS FADES FROM VIEW, OR AT LEAST GOES AWAY
FOR A WHILE.
spending-announcements part. Canada’s federal response to the coronavirus, though perhaps better than that of some other large North American democracies we could mention, was far from perfect. The accountability and reckoning that will follow the emergency is going to be hard enough for this minority government to manage; starting the process under a cloud of yet another ethics failure won’t help.
Call that the middle scenario — it doesn’t go away, but it doesn’t get materially worse. His life gets incrementally harder, the opposition has a few more lines for the next wave of attack ads, and ... that’s it.
But then again, there’s the worst-case scenario for Trudeau: the shoes keep dropping.
Admitting responsibility and apologizing was the right thing to do, for ethical and political reasons. But he won’t reap much benefit from that if more and more keeps coming out. How many other cabinet ministers have links to WE? (Maybe none, obviously, but it didn’t take long to discover Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s family ties, and there could be more.) Have there been other comparable votes that the PM should have recused himself on but didn’t? Given how casually the man seems to take ethical responsibilities, how little he seems to believe rules apply to him, it wouldn’t be shocking. And the public service may yet have things to say about this — after all, it was the bureaucrats that said only WE could do it, Trudeau says. Should any info to the contrary emerge, that could get interesting. Those are just a few possibilities. Half the political reporters in the country are probably digging away at this. Who knows what they’ll turn up.
So yes, credit where due — the prime minister has finally learned the value of a rapid admission of guilt and apology. It took him a weirdly long time to learn said lesson, but now that he has, it will likely be to his advantage. But he’s still very much at the mercy of events. The apology will help, come what may. Whether it’ll help enough is yet to be seen.