It may be hard to believe, but in his latest at Maclean’s, Paul Wells appears to be getting a little bit cynical about recent shenanigans in Ottawa:
We have learned so much. Within minutes Monday afternoon, two good reporters had stories (here and here) about the Chief Justice of Manitoba, who was a candidate to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and who, later, wasn’t. Both reporters unfurled similar yarns about a lone Prime Minister standing athwart the tide of conservatism by blocking — shudder — a Harper appointee from sitting on the top court. Jody Wilson-Raybould plays the role of villain in the piece.
Both reporters decorously neglect to mention that Trudeau’s choice for Chief Justice, Richard Wagner, was a Harper appointee.There are many things we can say about this story, working outward in concentric rings from the thing itself. First, Glenn Joyal’s views, as expressed in speeches that were said to alarm the prime minister, are almost comically orthodox. I first became aware of the notion that Charter litigation systematically airlifts important matters from the parliamentary arena and into the realm of jurisprudence in a Chantal Hébert column in the late 1990s. If I had paid more attention to literally any of my Canadian public administration profs a decade earlier I would have caught the argument then, because it is canvassed in every Canadian political science class. This is not wild-eyed Hayekism.
Second, perhaps the many thousands of Canadians who have applied for federal government appointments under what they thought was a confidential process, introduced by this prime minister, will want to contemplate a class-action suit against him. Because it is now radiantly clear to each of them that their CV is being held hostage by a claque of embattled sorcerers’ apprentices who will cheerfully wheel it over the transom to any waiting scribe if anything about them — their opinions, a fallen political star’s unfortunate decision to argue for their advancement — becomes politically inconvenient. This is the very stuff of the police state.
It was immediately fashionable to wonder on social media how everyone would react if Stephen Harper had done such a thing. It’s germane to note that Stephen Harper never did. Because he had more class. Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights: This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
Third, Justice Joyal’s wife was in poor health. Apparently we are to believe that 9,000 jobs depended on your knowing that.
If the Trudeau government is not the source of the leak, I assume we will see spectacular efforts deployed in the next 36 hours to find the leaker. Mark Norman-scale efforts. But I’m pretty sure that we needn’t hold our breath, because the government is the source of the leak; that the amiable chap who currently sits in the office once occupied by the Attorney General of Canada will not bestir himself to question Monday’s sickening attack on due process; and that the leak will actually be roundly applauded by the ambient cloud of Liberal and Liberal-adjacent opinion, which became self-aware this weekend and decided Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott are a virus endangering the party’s re-election chances and must therefore be stopped.
