National Post (National Edition)
THIS SORDID AFFAIR UNDERMINES PM’S MORAL AUTHORITY.
TWO-THIRDS OF CANADIANS SAY TRUDEAU HAS LOST THE MORAL AUTHORITY TO GOVERN
THE MOST GENEROUS READING WOULD BE THAT IT’S ALL BEEN ONE BIG ... MISUNDERSTANDING.
The flag is still flying on government buildings. There are no troops in the streets. The CBC is still broadcasting and the House of Commons committees are still functioning. Mail is still being delivered, and all those other little things Canadians take for granted are still being attended to. They carry on in their delightfully banal ways despite an Ipsos-reid poll’s troubling finding that two-thirds of Canadians say Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has lost the moral authority to govern.
That Canadian democracy is still functioning is worth pointing out, given the lightning strikes and the rolling thunder accompanying the Snc-lavalin bribery-case revelations. It is more than worrisome that despite their loudest protests to the contrary, the bigshots in Trudeau’s inner circle do not hold the foundational democratic principle of the rule of law to be especially sacrosanct after all. With all the cabinet resignations and committee-hearing drama, and the public astonishment with the creepiness of the whole thing, 73 per cent of Liberal voters, even, say the RCMP should be brought in to sort things out.
Blame the mainstream media generally, or even specifically The Globe and Mail, which broke the story a month ago, all you like. Recite as accurately and loudly as you please from the Liberal party handbook’s provisions on “jobs for the middle class and people working hard to join it.” The slightest hint that this thematic talking point is being deployed as a justification for monkeying around with judicial independence will be seen by reasonable people as fatally self-incriminating. But go right ahead.
These prevarications were not what the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights heard on Wednesday morning from Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau, and Trudeau’s dear friend for three decades, who resigned three weeks ago after having found himself a central character in the whole drama. In his long-awaited testimony, Butts insisted there was no improper pressure applied to attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould, at least not intentionally, and that all that was being asked of her was that a “second opinion” might be sought on the propriety of a remediation agreement with Snc-lavalin, instead of a criminal prosecution. An eminent jurist might be consulted. Or perhaps a panel of jurists.
When Butts talked about the 9,000 Snc-lavalin jobs that may or may not be at stake in the case, he spoke as a Cape Bretoner, from a family of miners. He spoke with his heart and his guts. As for his account of his interactions with Wilson-Raybould, and his take on the various communications and encounters the Prime Minister’s Office had with Wilson-Raybould on the Snc-lavalin file, the most generous reading would be that it’s all been one big horrible misunderstanding.
Whether this repairs any of the damage done to Team Trudeau cannot yet be known, but that Ipsos-reid poll was concluded even before Treasury Board president Jane Philpott resigned from cabinet on Monday. Her explanation: “Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised.” Set your hair on fire if you must, but Philpott’s view is in complete agreement with the opinion Ipsos-reid attributes to the overwhelm- ing majority of Canadians.
Carleton University’s Philippe Lagassé, an expert on the Westminster system of government, goes so far as to say that there’s a silver lining to the Snc-lavalin scandal, or affair, or crisis, and it’s that “we’re witnessing a healthy democratic immune system at work.” This is quite correct. But the flags would also still be flying and Canada Post would still be delivering the mail even if the crisis reached such a pitch as to cause Trudeau to resign in despair and ignominy. All the better for the Liberal party too, perhaps. To lead them into an election in October, or sooner, they might choose, say, Jody Wilson-raybould, or perhaps even Jane Philpott, or someone with credibility on both sides of these internecine Liberal rumbles. Somebody untainted by all this. Anybody with more gravitas than Trudeau.
It would be amusing to see how Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives would handle that. They’ve invested so heavily and deeply in building up Trudeau as the bane of Canadian prosperity and low- tax liberty they might well be lost without him. They’d already constructed Gerald Butts as a sinister, Rasputin-type character. As Trudeau’s bloodless consigliere. And he’s not there anymore. As for the New Democratic Party’s Jagmeet Singh, the gravest threat he poses to the Liberals is that he can outperform, outdance and outdo Trudeau in any quarter of the fashionably intersectional politics that take up so much space these days across the liberalleft. How would things go for Singh, without Trudeau to kick around?
But for all his charm and his wavy hair and his woke-ness, Trudeau is only the Liberal party’s public face, its primary celebrity endorsement. It’s all well and good to evaluate Trudeau’s treatment of Wilson-raybould as a measure of his feminist credentials, which Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has so ably, if floridly, affirmed. Reasonable people can differ about that. But the only reason we’re preoccupied with these sideshows in the first place is that the Liberal majority that took over the House of Commons four years ago began as Trudeau’s personal vanity project. And in the pushing and shoving of a crisis like the Snc-lavalin imbroglio, Liberal party rhetoric is increasingly and predictably taking on exactly the tenor and tone you’d expect of a personality cult.
This is why it’s been so exceedingly difficult to make sense of whether there’s any merit in Team Trudeau’s sketchy and inarticulate answers to the more important questions at hand. Was the persistent hounding of Wilson- Raybould really within the bounds of collegial cabinet issue-probing? Was the point of all those texts and emails and meetings really just, you know, to kick some ideas around? Is it possible that it was all just a big misunderstanding? Is there really some genuine excuse available in the constitutional ambiguities that arise from a minister wearing an attorney general’s hat as well as a justice minister’s hat?
Let’s grant Team Trudeau the benefit of the doubt at least to the point that its case, such as it is, may have its merits. They haven’ t exactly helped themselves by allowing all those ugly stories to be circulated about Wilson-raybould, or by allowing Finance Minister Bill Morneau to try to undermine Philpott, for instance, by ascribing an ulterior motive to her resignation — a bond of loyalty and personal friendship that binds her to Wilson-raybould. Morneau’s rudeness followed Trudeau’s insistence that the 30-plus members of his cabinet must publicly declare their confidence in him. To swear a loyalty oath, in other words.
Are we supposed to believe that Morneau’s insinuations about Philpott’s motives do not themselves arise from his own loyalty to Trudeau? After all, if Trudeau hangs because of this, the same rope will tighten around Morneau’s throat, because as Wilson-raybould’s testimony showed, Morneau was up to his neck in it all.
For now, we’re all still stuck with a perfectly plausible scenario that involves Trudeau and his most senior officials involved in a sordid effort to make a Quebec engineering giant’s criminal charges go away, hounding and badgering attorney general Jody Wilson-raybould until she was shuffled out of her post and rendered powerless. Butts’ evidence may well take some wind out of that.
In the meantime, the flag is still flying on government buildings. So at least there’s that.