Trudeau can still recover from SNC-Lavalin
Up until six weeks ago, it looked like Justin Trudeau had fine-tuned his operation into election readiness for 2019. The SNC-Lavalin affair has blown those best-laid plans to smithereens, to say the least.
Now, with a budget on the immediate horizon and an election just seven months away, Trudeau has some immediate repair work to do, which will go well beyond the mere fine-tuning originally envisioned for this year.
In the days ahead, it bears watching how the prime minister goes about shoring up operations at the very heart of his government — an effort that can conveniently be summed up as a 5C exercise.
Cabinet: It’s been almost forgotten in the heat of the back-and-forth over Jody Wilson-Raybould, but another cabinet member, Jane Philpott, stepped down from her Treasury Board post less than two weeks ago.
It’s an important, if lowprofile job in government and right now, it’s being carried by Carla Qualtrough, one of the more impressive performers in Trudeau’s cabinet. But she can’t keep doing double duty as Treasury Board president and minister in charge of public services and procurement.
So once again, the prime minister has to do some kind of shuffle — his third one this winter — and he’ll be gambling that this one causes him less trouble than the January shuffle that started this whole mess in the first place.
Counsel: Gerald Butts was no ordinary principal secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office. He was the advisory equivalent to a minister of everything. No one can recall any previous administration with someone this omnipotent at the heart of the PMO. Very little happened in Trudeau’s government without some kind of input from Butts.
Butts has been gone a month, and from what I’ve gathered, he’s well and truly gone — perhaps back in some role for the campaign, but no guarantees.
So Trudeau now has to figure out how to replace this powerful friend and ally with one, or possibly two people.
There’s no shortage of senior Liberals waiting by the phone these days, waiting for the call to suit up and report for duty in the PMO. But Trudeau is apparently not looking for veterans of previous regimes, so some may want to abandon the vigil or auditions on TV panels.
One name that keeps popping up is the current ambassador to the U.S., David MacNaughton, who already is considered part of Trudeau’s inner circle.
But MacNaughton has said he feels he has more work to do in the job he now holds. (He would say that, though, regardless of what his immediate future holds.)
Caucus: Liberal MPs are restive these days, worried about what SNC-Lavalin has done to their re-election chances, and many quietly grumbling that Wilson-Raybould’s complaints against the PMO have some resonance in the caucus, too. Morale problems are never a good thing in Liberal caucus politics (insert “Chrétien-Martin” in Google search), but they can be disastrous this close to an election.
Trudeau could want to consider beefing up his caucusoutreach efforts in the weeks ahead, either with the appointment of some type of staff envoy, or simply paying more heed to frustrations that are surfacing in the wake of the Wilson-Raybould and Philpott resignations.
Clerk: Last weekend, the PMO told the Star that Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick would remain in charge of the panel overseeing potential foreign interference in the election, despite the opposition’s loss of confidence in him. This could be a holding pattern. Speculation persists that Wernick’s over-the-top testimony at the Commons justice committee has not helped Trudeau and that it might be time for a replacement at the highest level of the public service.
There’s an old joke about how “deputy minister shuffle” is the most inside-Ottawa story of all; of interest only within 50 metres of Parliament Hill. That being said, watch out for a deputy-minister shuffle — it’s a sign that Trudeau believes the damage of SNC-Lavalin has reached deeper into his inner circle than we already appreciate.
Communications: Trudeau’s communications operation has come in for a lot of criticism throughout the past six weeks, for failing to anticipate, handle or contain the widening SNCLavalin saga. Without a doubt, the communications apparatus has been caught flat-footed, but it’s also short-staffed now in a serious way. Butts, the hands-on-everything guy, was also a big part of the Trudeau government’s spin machine, forging and maintaining a vast network of media contacts. That vacuum will now have to be filled, too, by someone senior enough to be regarded as a direct channel to and from Trudeau.
The prime minister was in Florida for most of the past week, but he did return for a day to take care of some unspecified business, presumed to be budget-related. While that’s not a bad theory, chances are that any one of these five-C agenda items also tugged Trudeau back to his office in Ottawa. His hopes for getting past the SNC-Lavalin damage rest heavily on how well he handles each one of them in coming days.
Morale problems are never a good thing in Liberal caucus politics, but they can be disastrous this close to an election