Trudeau has been seduced by the dark side

For a man who adores Star

Wars, Justin Trudeau appears to have drawn the wrong lessons from the cosmic saga between the forces of good and evil. If this week's drama around the confidence vote in the House of Commons is any indication, it appears the prime minister has now, in trying to throttle Parliament, gone full-on Darth Vader. In the Star Wars argot, Trudeau has embraced the “dark side” of the Force.

There is a tremendous irony here, as it was Trudeau who rode to office on the promise of being Luke Skywalker to Darth Harper, the evil Lord (in Trudeau's telling) who tormented Parliament and the non-partisan professional public service for nine long years. And yet it is Trudeau who is now acting the bully, blaming public servants, proroguing Parliament, filibustering committees, and threatening confidence over a benign motion in the House, all because his political opponents are trying to get to the bottom of a dodgy contract to manage $912 million in student grants that was given to an enterprise with close ties to the prime minister, his family and his former finance minister.

According to the Liberal government, the mere existence of a special committee investigating these matters is a huge distraction from all of the good work they're doing to address the pandemic.

Given the paucity of talent on the Liberal front bench — see: Blair, Bill and Hadju, Patty — this might indeed be true. But given the Liberals also swear up and down they've done nothing wrong, it's strange they won't simply pull back the curtain and let the opposition scream into the void.

The obvious conclusion to draw is that there is something the prime minister wants to hide. Given that much of what has been released on the WE contract has contradicted what the prime minister has told Canadians publicly, the opposition are well within their rights to probe it and other spending, including the sole-source $237-million contract for ventilators made by former Liberal MP Frank Baylis's company Baylis Medical (the contract itself is with a company called FTI Professional Grade, which itself was only established 11 days before the contract was signed). If the pandemic truly is the priority, the Liberal government must explain why this contract has so far failed to deliver the life-saving medical technology it promised.

The scrutiny being applied by the opposition is uncomfortable and much of it is politically motivated. But it is also the needed grease that produces better government. The Liberal record as a minority coping with a global pandemic is a mix of good and bad, with some of the bad having only been fixed because of a sharp opposition eye, as evidenced in the spring when the Liberals were forced to rework a support program when the opposition spotted that the program didn't actually do what the government claimed. A government truly committed to Parliament would lean into it instead of pushing it away or shutting it down.

Alas, Justin Trudeau appears to prefer government by fiat, despite all of his lofty promises and rhetoric in 2015. There is no more accountability or transparency in Trudeau's Ottawa than there was in Stephen Harper's. You could make a good case there is actually less. In a sense it's the natural response to parliamentary opposition. Who amongst us loves it when our work is frustrated by an opponent? But Trudeau doesn't

get to be graded against his predecessor; he promised a different standard, something his fellow travellers should remember.

Stephen Harper might not have been the biggest fan of parliamentary accountability but he made a virtue out of necessity during the global recession by parading the achievements of the Economic Action Plan when the then-minority Parliament mandated quarterly updates on his government's spending. If Trudeau is so pleased with his pandemic performance he should have no problem boring Parliament with all of his good work.

The real difference, of course, is that it's Trudeau's behaviour that's in question, not only his government's spending. And given that this prime minister has already taken two strikes from the ethics commissioner, perhaps it's no surprise he'd rather choke the life out of Parliament than let democracy have a further peek into his affairs.