Drop the poses, Justin

Slogans sound hollow amid key resignations

Fortuna, the wayward goddess, has abandoned her dalliance with Justin Trudeau. What he wins from here on, if he wins at all, will be on his own work, not her flippant favour. The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolledup sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-getto-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.

None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting shtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19 C cold alert) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie. The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.

Here’s where we are. After these two key resignations, on a principle as central as the rule of law, after accusations that he and his administration wished to bend or break that rule of law, Mr. Trudeau has either to drop out altogether, or, start acting like the full man, and directly, without intermediaries, face the challenge that confronts his government. Drop the poses. Choke off the slogans and pieties. Leave the jacket on. Sit down and speak to Canadians in detail on the moral and legal questions these two most serious ministers have put to him. Cut the theatricals. Don’t talk fatuously of the “bigger picture.” There is no bigger picture than whether you are morally entitled to govern.

Drop, too, the jobs cloak. There are too many unbuilt pipelines and an entire region that has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, while your government was writing Bill C-69, dancing at global-warming summits aimed at shutting down the oil industry, and writing new hymns to job-killing carbon taxes, for you now to pose as a job creator, and to shamelessly posit that saving SNCLavalin’s jobs was worth mauling the rule of law.

Ms. Philpott’s exercise of her choice is, in its way, even more explosive than Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s. The latter was harassed over months; she was the focus and centre of the pressure campaign to desert her responsibilities as attorney general.

The impact on her was direct. All that pressure, the special pleading and the veiled threats could understandably colour her judgment. Not to say, actually, that they did — but as a postulate, let us consider that. But then we come to Ms. Philpott, arguably (pace Chrystia Freeland) the most adult, accomplished, unabrasive minister in Trudeau’s entire cabinet, welcomed in the early days as a lustrous ornament to his “new way of doing politics” and regarded since her arrival and service in many portfolios as singularly efficient and superbly competent.

This is the woman who resigned yesterday. Not some whining, marginal backbencher, with far less talent than ego, nursing a grudge over getting passed by.

Ms. Philpott, in one manner of speaking, was outside the contest, but being in cabinet, having been there when Ms. Wilson-Raybould presented to it, and to caucus — we may presume she’s heard the full tale. And having heard it, both sides, she concludes she has to resign; that the price (too high) for staying in this cabinet after what has been done to Jody Wilson-Raybould, is the sacrifice of her personal integrity and a scar on her conscience. Philpott’s resignation, intrinsically linked to the case made by Wilson-Raybould, is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government. Does anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office now actually believe that hauling out the knackered horse of climate change, placing Catherine McKenna in its tendentious, preachy saddle to tag-team with Justin, is going to — in that woeful cliché — change the channel?

If they do, they are delusional. They haven’t just drunk the Kool-Aid, they’ve poured it in the hot tub first, had a full splash-bathe-and-back-rub, and drunk the leavings.

I have a thought. Seeing what remains of their commitments to changing the voting system, abandoning omnibus bills, being open and transparent, remaining dedicated to the rule of law, unlocking Alberta’s oil — seeing where the Trudeau government is on all of these abandoned/mismanaged files — why should anyone think that even on its golden child of an issue, climate change, it is really any more serious or committed than on any of the others? Climate change might just be the last big pose.

A word on Gerry Butts’ longed-for appearance Wednesday morning: Why is Gerry Butts appearing? He doesn’t even work there anymore. Why all this drama for an ex-employee when the CEO is still on the premises — and he’s the one, the only one, who has all the answers.

Gerry is of course welcome to come by later. Enough for now though with the surrogates and deputies.

Two serious women of unsullied integrity, who committed their fortunes to joining your government, have told the public that morally they could stay no longer.

Mr. Trudeau owes them the courtesy of an answer, and the country of which he is the prime minister, a candid and complete accounting.