Colby Cosh asks who is the one with memory issues — former Trudeau puppet-master Gerald Butts who resigned unexpectedly (but not at all for reasons related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, we’re told) or the minister who was relegated to the least important portfolio (in the view of the Trudeau government) in a totally unrelated cabinet shuffle after failing to fold under pressure?
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.
[…]
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.
