At least he never said she lied

Which witness is telling the truth?

On Wednesday, in testifying about the Snc-lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. Until the criminal charges against SNC-LAVAlin are heard in a trial and resolved, or until they are abandoned, the thing will remain news, and Liberals will suffer.

The government’s line is that it was inappropriate for former attorney general Jody Wilson-raybould to make a final commitment to leaving her Director of Public Prosecutions alone and to living with the decision not to enter a plea-bargaining process with Snc-lavalin. Her successor in the office, David Lametti, will not make such a commitment now. We will never get the reassurance of hearing that the matter is closed. The professed view of cabinet, what’s left of it, is that it would be wrong to close it.

The government has tried to explain its belabouring of Wilson-raybould as being perfectly appropriate. She was supposed to verrrry carefully consider the fate of 9,000 Snc-lavalin jobs and a head office in Quebec, and then consider it again, and then consider it again. Butts tells us that they weren’t looking for a particular politically convenient answer, mind you.

They just stayed after her to keep reconsidering the answer she kept giving, explicitly or implicitly. They reassured her at every turn that the decision was hers. And then they got rid of her and made it someone else’s.

The Canadian public has been quick to accept a causal connection between (1) the PMO’S persistent, unsuccessful urging of Wilson-raybould to rethink the Snc-lavalin decision and (2) her demotion to the thankless, difficult, less prestigious portfolio of Veterans Affairs. Butts’ strategic goal Wednesday was to sever this connection in our minds. He says he did not know that Wilson-raybould felt pressured about the prosecution of SNC until the shuffle was first brought up.

In her committee appearance, Wilson-raybould mentioned many ugly hints of partisan or electoral interests, and a few menacing remarks, that were dropped into conversations between Wilson-raybould and Gerald Butts’ various minions (or himself, or in one case the big boss). When it comes to the conversations of which Butts has personal knowledge, he says he doesn’t remember them the same way she does. When it comes to the conversations of which Butts has no personal knowledge, he says he cannot imagine that good, decent, honest public servants would behave in the way she says they did.

But of course he does not mean to cast any aspersions on the former attorney general or dispute her factual account of events. No no no. Butts was not in a position to say in plain English that Wilson-raybould had told untruths; that would look bad.

He is, whether he intends to, creating a pretext for Liberal surrogates in the media to say that Wilson-Raybould probably revised or obfuscated her memory of late 2018.

Who knows who’s telling the truth, really. But it looks like maybe Wilson-Raybould is bent on some kinda demented kamikaze revenge. Or maybe an undemocratic takeover of the Liberal party. See if we don’t hear people saying all these things, and more.

In any events, the Butts story is that the January cabinet shuffle precipitated by Scott Brison’s resignation was pure bad luck. Why Wilson-raybould’s position as justice minister would necessarily be involved in the shuffle at all was poorly explained. But Butts wants us to believe that the initial of- fer to transfer Wilson-raybould to the Indigenous services ministry was actually a sign of the prime minister’s high regard for her.

She balked, as an Indigenous person who did not want to be in the position of having anything to do with the Indian Act. This is a pretty common attitude, one might even say a prevalent one, among our First Nations. Butts admits he ought to have known that Wilson-raybould might feel this way, although he does not say that the catastrophic after-effects of the request — given that he and the PM couldn’t just leave her the hell alone at Justice — were the reason he resigned. (Why not? It seems like as good a reason as any. Isn’t this an instance of privilege-induced blindness causing harm?)

In theory, if you wanted to get rid of a truculent justice minister who won’t put a thumb on the scales of justice, offering her a job you know she will never, ever take seems like a good way to set about doing that. But this is just an unhappy coincidence, and we are not to draw inferences from it. I would conclude that “The Liberal government undoubtedly meant well,” but saying this sarcastically has, I am afraid, already become a Canadian cliché.