National Post (National Edition)
The real Trudeau emerges
Of all the words written or spoken about the crisis devouring the Trudeau government, perhaps the most enlightening were the foolish remarks offered by Jati Sidhu, a Liberal member from British Columbia.
“The way she’s acting, I think she couldn’t handle the stress,” he opined in the wake of Jody Wilson-Raybould’s astonishing testimony. “I think there’s somebody else behind — maybe her father — pulling the strings.”
Sidhu was quickly compelled to apologize in the House, but his hasty retreat doesn’t alter the sentiment he expressed, which reflected the sort of thing men have been saying about women for all eternity. It’s an opinion the Trudeau government came to power vowing to eradicate, to whatever degree it could, from the catalogue of male prejudices. But there it was, smack dab in the middle of the prime minister’s own caucus. Just as it seems to be deeply entrenched in his government as well.
John Dean, the famed Watergate figure, wrote last week that he first met the real Richard Nixon when he informed the president — whom he served as White House counsel — that there was a cancer on his presidency. He wanted the president to end the coverup that threatened to destroy him: to stop the lies, the deceit, the attacks on opponents. Nixon, of course, rejected his advice, and we know the rest of the story.
It’s fair to say Jody Wilson-raybould met the real Justin Trudeau when she told him she’d done her due diligence on the Snc-lavalin matter and concluded it was just and proper to let the prosecution proceed. She refused to intercede on the decision by the director of public prosecutions, or to engage in a hunt for wiggle room that would save the company from prosecution on corruption charges despite the prime minister’s clear indication that he very much wanted her to do so.
That’s when the real Trudeau showed himself. It wasn’t the Trudeau who’d embraced her the day she was sworn in as minister of justice and attorney general, as she cupped his head in her hands and they gazed emotionally into one another’s eyes. That had been a special moment, one built for the cameras. It had obviously meant a great deal to her, and likely to him as well, though perhaps not for the same reasons.
For Trudeau it was a perfect reflection of the imagery he wished to convey to the Canadian people. It represented the shift in branding from the previous, hard-edged Conservative administration to his new, enlightened, “progressive” replacement, the one that had run so hard on the pledges of gender respect and Indigenous reconciliation. For Trudeau, to be so clearly admired by a woman as accomplished as Wilson-raybould — former Crown prosecutor, First Nations chief, and now holder of the office that gave Trudeau’s father his political start — couldn’t be better.
Presumably Wilson-raybould retained that impression of her boss for some time, which shows how effective branding can be. But then she ran into the other Trudeau. And that’s when she had her John Dean moment.
Trudeau’s refusal to call off the dogs that were pressing her to enable the rescue attempt on SNC-Lavalin betrayed the image he’d worked so hard to craft. Though he’d promised to award half the seats in his cabinet to women, and had kept his promise, it was the men who now pushed her to play along. Powerful, important men. The finance minister, the clerk of the Privy Council, Trudeau’s principle secretary, the prime minister himself, and those minions in his office who were at his command. They sided with him, suggested she get real, warned her it would be a bad idea to find herself at loggerheads with her boss, intimated that if she couldn’t go along to get along, Trudeau would find someone who could. As in: “Sure, it’s your decision, but are you fully aware of the possible consequences?”
They insist now, one and all, that in no way did their message convey any pressure. Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s friend and top adviser, resigned while insisting he’d done nothing wrong, and has now asked to appear before the committee with documentation that presumably backs up his point of view. Michael Wernick will get another chance to assert his conviction that the prime minister acted only with the finest intentions. Finance Minister Bill Morneau has stated that, in his view, no one in his department said anything out of line.
In a panel discussion immediately following Wilson-raybould’s testimony, Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault — who won one of just four Liberal seats in Alberta and thus must top the list of highly endangered species — debuted the line the party would hold to.
Sure “legitimate conversations” took place, but undue pressure? Nah.
“I believe she feels that way about what took place,” he said of Wilson-Raybould’s charge that top Liberals mounted a “consistent and sustained effort … to seek to politically interfere … in an inappropriate effort” to make her change her mind.
He cited Wernick asserting that “the job of being a cabinet minister is pressure. That’s what the job is.” When asked what the clerk meant when he said Trudeau was determined to rescue Lavalin one way or another, Boissonnault suddenly remembered he wasn’t in the room at the time and couldn’t comment. “What I can say is that he was very clear that neither the prime minister or the clerk ever directed her to go into a remediation agreement with Snc-lavalin.”
It’s always a bad sign when a government’s last line of defence is that it never explicitly broke the law, no matter how much it may have danced around it. To quote Boissonnault again: “Direction is the line that’s too far … everything else is a legitimate conversation in public policy.”
So there’s the Liberal position: no line was crossed, the law was adhered to; Wilson-raybould was a senior minister and a minister’s job is all about pressure; evidently she just couldn’t handle it.
Jati Sidhu obviously absorbed the message, but, unfortunately for him, wasn’t as adept in transmitting it. Instead he transparently reflected the underlying bias that women just aren’t up to the job. There just had to have been a man back there, somewhere, pulling the strings. Notably, his apology didn’t indicate he’d changed his mind, just that he shouldn’t have said it out loud. “My comments were inappropriate. Whether inside or outside this House, it is incumbent on all of us to treat each other with respect at all times.”
He read the statement from a piece of paper, apparently unable to commit the 29 words to memory. He looked anything but sincere, much less moved by a spirit of contrition.
And why should he be? Sidhu understood the rules. Trudeau might follow a feminist script in public, but away from the cameras the same old plot applied.