A real loss for the Liberals

Trudeau gets lesson in politics and principles

Jane Philpott just gave Justin Trudeau a lesson in doing politics differently.

Resigning from cabinet on a matter of principle is so old-fashioned it evokes images of monocles, pocket watches and top hats. For many career politicians, their occupation is a substitute for a private life. They have accomplished little beyond politics and cannot contemplate the inner emptiness of voluntarily removing themselves from the action.

Philpott’s decision to step down from her cabinet post as Treasury Board president Monday because she found it untenable to support the government and its policies in the midst of the SNCLavalin affair speaks to the character of someone who knows there is more to life than advancement up the greasy pole of political life. “I must abide by my core values, my ethical responsibilities and constitutional obligations,” she said in her resignation letter.

“There can be a cost to acting on one’s principles but there is a bigger cost to abandoning them.”

Her sympathy for Jody Wilson-Raybould, and the former attorney general and justice minister’s allegation that she was subject to undue pressure to intervene in the prosecution of SNC, was known. When Wilson-Raybould resigned, Philpott tweeted a character reference for her colleague and friend. They worked particularly closely when Wilson-Raybould was justice minister and Philpott was health minister, on legislation such as the assisted dying and cannabis bills.

More recently, the two shared a table at the Speaker’s Burns Supper, at which Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes launched a broadside against her own party over the justice minister’s demotion.

It was incendiary stuff — a satirical screed about “Indian” women not being able to do things that the “white man” can — and even being in the vicinity was potentially career-limiting.

In the normal course of Canadian politics, sympathy tends to run only as far as is politically expedient.

But Philpott is a former family physician who lost a child while working in Niger — she knows real life and death issues, and resigning from cabinet is not that. In her statement Monday she said the evidence of efforts by “politicians and/ or officials” to pressure the former attorney general to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case, “and the evidence as to the content of those efforts,” had raised serious concerns for her. “Those concerns have been augmented by the views expressed by my constituents and other Canadians.”

Philpott is a real loss to government, having earned good reviews as health minister before moving to the newly created post at Indigenous services. One of her first public moves was to hold a press conference to let the world know precisely how bad things were with Indigenous service delivery — a counter-intuitive, if risky, thing to do for a politician. “It doesn’t help for anyone to be in denial,” she said. The esteem in which she was held was reflected in Trudeau’s decision to make her Treasury Board president after Scott Brison’s resignation.

The surprise perhaps is that her resignation comes before all witnesses have been heard in the affair. A friend, who also happens to be a retired judge, emailed me to say he and his cross-country chat group of jurists was upset that “all the journalists seem to accept Jody Wilson-Raybould’s testimony as being the truth, prior to all the other witnesses being heard. Not fair.” But it turns out it is not just journalists and partisans who believe Trudeau used his cabinet-making power to interfere with the attorney general’s prosecutorial independence.

The prime minister has been responsible for his own misfortune, plunging into a sea of platitudes that changed with the tides when he should have been telling Canadians who said what to whom. That he did not made him look like someone with something to hide.

But we are relying entirely on the former justice minister’s testimony for much of the narrative that has been accepted as gospel by so many Canadians — some of which came to her secondhand from her former chief of staff, Jessica Prince. Did Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts really say “there is no solution that doesn’t involve some interference,” as Wilson-Raybould says Trudeau’s former principal secretary told Prince? If so, what was the context? He has denied allegations that he put undue pressure on the former attorney general, and is set to give his version of events on Wednesday morning, so a degree of patience is in order. But Philpott has made her decision. She is out of cabinet while, like Wilson-Raybould, continuing to sit in caucus. Clearly, neither has any confidence in Trudeau, so maybe they are hanging around to see if there is a change at the top. There are said to be a handful of MPs who sympathize with that point of view.

The prime minister is now pushing a party as uncontrollable as the fourth wheel on a supermarket trolley. It could go in any direction. For now at least, the majority of career Liberals believe he can guarantee them their indexed pensions and a job indoors with no heavy lifting.

Until such time as they change that assessment, Trudeau’s position remains safe.

THE PM IS NOW PUSHING A PARTY AS UNCONTROLLABLE AS THE FOURTH WHEEL ON A SUPERMARKET TROLLEY.