TRUDEAU’S GOVERNMENT HAS WORKED HARD TO KEEP CANADIANS IN THE DARK.
It’s easy to understand why Justin Trudeau has worked so assiduously to muzzle parliamentary committees and the hearings they hold, despite pledging to do the opposite before he became prime minister.
Committees cause headaches. Perhaps in his early days as a party leader, when he was concentrating on being upbeat and cheerful, Trudeau envisioned committees as just another version of question period, where the words that come out of peoples’ mouths can be controlled or ignored with few repercussions, because hardly any Canadians pay attention or care.
During his government’s first mandate, he learned otherwise, suffering considerable reputational damage with his heavy-handed efforts to gag hearings into the Snc-lavalin scandal and his treatment of former justice minister Jody Wilson-raybould. It became harder once the Liberals were reduced to a minority and he had to resort to proroguing Parliament to halt revelations about the WE debacle, and later to join the Bloc Québécois in pointedly shutting down a probe into allegations of sexual misconduct in Canada’s military.
Trudeau has been fortunate that Canadians’ preoccupation with the COVID crisis, and the media’s fixation with the pandemic, have pushed other stories into distant corners of public awareness. But committees can be like the virus itself: you think you’ve contained it in one location and it pops up in another.
Thus the government went after the defence committee, only to have the status of women committee take up the same issue. The result was sensational testimony by an Army major whose detailed allegations about her relationship with former chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance poked giant holes in the government’s claim that it took the issue seriously.
Maj. Kellie Brennan testified that she had a 14-year sexual relationship with Vance, even though he was her boss and it’s a violation of military regulations to have a relationship with a subordinate.
During their years together, she said, Vance fathered two of her children but refused to support them, bragged that he was “untouchable” for his actions and that he “owned” the military investigative body that would look into any complaints, told her to lie to investigators when they began looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against him and warned that there would be “consequences” if she didn’t.
“It’s recorded and the (investigation team) has all of the recordings of him directing me what to say, what not to say, how to say it, what not to say, what to exclude, how to perjure myself and to lie,” she said. “In my experience, in many different areas, the law does not apply to him.”
The Liberals might be able to slough off responsibility for the allegations against Vance on the grounds that they were misled, or that previous governments also failed to come to terms with talk of his activities, if not for concurrent evidence that they did their best to turn a deaf ear to the claims when efforts were made to make them pay attention.
In March, a former military ombudsman, Gary Walbourne, gave the charges new life when he testified that he sought advice from Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan over an allegation against Vance in 2018, only to have Sajjan push away from the table and refuse to look at the evidence. Sajjan — another former subordinate of Vance’s — denied the claim and said he passed on Walbourne’s concern to authorities in the Privy Council Office (PCO).
Sajjan’s position has since been badly shredded. His argument that he had no duty to track the subsequent inquiries has been challenged, as the defence minister has ultimate responsibility for the military. Officials from the PCO made an attempt to follow up on the allegations, but gave up when Walbourne wouldn’t share information the complainant had asked him to keep confidential.
Officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) initially sought to distance themselves from the affair, but were forced to acknowledge they’d been informed of the charges soon after they were made. When the defence committee sought testimony from Elder Marques, the PMO employee who handled the issue, Liberal MPS launched a fierce battle to prevent him from appearing.
Marques did finally face questioning, revealing that Trudeau’s top adviser knew of the Vance situation from the beginning. He told MPS last week that he only learned the details when he was informed by Katie Telford, Trudeau’s chief of staff, or one of her assistants. He, too, contacted the Privy Council Office, spoke to Sajjan’s chief of staff and promptly “had no further involvement in this matter.” Everyone assumed someone else was handling the matter, conveniently freeing them from acting further.
The see-no-evil performance put on by the Liberals is just about what women have come to expect when they try to bring forward complaints about the treatment they receive in the military. Trudeau, Vance and Vance’s successors have all loudly declaimed their determination to root out any form of discrimination or abuse, only to have committee members presented with ample evidence that nothing of the sort has been done.
In her recent budget, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged funding for prevention training, victim support and greater independent oversight of abuse investigations. If the Liberals can ride the budget to a majority, perhaps this time they’ll follow through. It’s a good bet they’ll also do whatever they can to ensure future committees find it much harder to expose their mistakes. The less Canadians know about these things, the easier it is for governments to do nothing about them. And this government has worked hard to keep them in the dark.
YOU THINK YOU’VE CONTAINED IT IN ONE LOCATION AND IT POPS UP IN ANOTHER.