BUTTS BOWS OUT
There are key pieces missing in this puzzle.
“Any accusation that I or the staff put pressure on the Attorney General is simply not true,” wrote now-former principal secretary to the prime minister Gerald Butts in his startling resignation statement Monday. Accepting the resignation, which centres on the deepening SNC-Lavalin/ Jody Wilson-Raybould affair, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praised his former top adviser and close friend, saying Butts had served with “integrity, sage advice and devotion.”
According to Butts, he quit because anonymous sources accuse him of pressuring Wilson-Raybould, when she was still justice minister, to help SNC-Lavalin obtain a remediation agreement on corruption charges. But, Butts writes, “I categorically deny the accusation that I or anyone else in this office pressured Ms. Wilson-Raybould.”
If so, why step down? Why not simply make a categorical denial, defend the rest of the prime ministerial staff (as his statement does), then willingly appear before any parliamentary committee or independent inquiry that wants to know more? There are key pieces missing here.
Absent more facts, one might think Butts wants to deflect attention away from the prime minister in this sordid saga. That won’t work: The principal secretary’s resignation will only lead many to conclude the PMO is out of control on a crisis that began less than two weeks ago and that has seen the prime minister lurch from partial explanations to half-baked excuses to occasional incoherence. We must know more.
This is not the first time a key political aide has fallen on his sword, of course, but Canadians may not be aware of just how close the relationship is between Butts and Trudeau. It is their friendship that makes the resignation so extraordinary.
The two met more than 25 years ago, at McGill University, and became fast friends. In an interview with the Huffington Post some years ago, Butts said the friendship was based on the usual things that bond young men together: discussions about girls, sports and studies. Politics would only come into it much later. Trudeau became a teacher; Butts went off to Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty’s office as a policy adviser.
There, he wrote much of the platform McGuinty campaigned on to win the 2003 Ontario election. Butts came to be seen as a power-broker in the new premier’s office, which centralized decision-making in ways similar to how the PMO operates in modern times.
Joining Team Trudeau in 2012, Butts resumed his role as an articulate and thoughtful friend whose advice the future prime minister trusted implicitly. One early instance: As the Citizen reported in a 2014-15 profile of Butts, when Trudeau blurted out, unplanned, his support for legalized marijuana, it was Butts who turned the thought into an actual policy plank for the election that Trudeau went on to win.
As a top backroom operative, Butts was clearly capable of getting his hands dirty. “He’s not in the priesthood, he’s in politics. And politics is a blood sport,” former Ontario Progressive Conservative adviser Leslie Noble told the Citizen in 2014.
We can assume Butts practised that blood sport as well as any top aide. But he is adamant he didn’t do so with Wilson-Raybould. Indeed, he writes that their relationship “has always been defined by mutual respect, candour and an honest desire to work together.”
“Candour” is an interesting word to use in an affair now choking in rumour and innuendo. The Butts resignation makes nothing clearer. It is time to hear from Wilson-Raybould.