{"id":47650,"date":"2019-04-04T03:00:56","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T07:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47650"},"modified":"2019-04-03T11:35:48","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T15:35:48","slug":"lpc-omerta-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/04\/04\/lpc-omerta-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"LPC Omert\u00e0<\/em> in action"},"content":{"rendered":"

Omert\u00e0<\/em>, according to Wikipedia, is “a Southern Italian code of honor and code of silence that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.” It’s also a remarkably appropriate way to describe the Liberal Party of Canada’s standard operating procedure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately the choice that is before you,\u201d Jody Wilson-Raybould pleaded with her caucus colleagues, in a letter written hours before they were to pass sentence on her, \u201cis about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

But they made that choice long ago. They knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle \u2014 and mercilessly punishes those who do not.<\/p>\n

So on the question of whether to expel the former minister of justice and attorney general \u2014 along with the former Treasury Board president, Jane Philpott \u2014 for the crime of denouncing the attempt, by the prime minister and senior government officials, to interfere with a criminal prosecution, there could have been little doubt how they would vote.<\/p>\n

Whether they chose to shoot the messengers so spontaneously, over Justin Trudeau\u2019s objections, as some reports have claimed \u2014 they were \u201cdetermined to take the matter into their own hands,\u201d according to a Canadian Press story, as if MPs were so eager to prove their obedience to the leader as to be willing to defy him \u2014 or whether they did so under orders doesn\u2019t much matter. The rotting of the soul is the same either way.<\/p>\n

We can now see, if it were not already apparent, the moral compass by which the prime minister and his caucus steer. The scandal in the SNC-Lavalin affair is, by this reckoning, not the months-long campaign to subvert the independence of the attorney general and, through her, to force the independent director of public prosecutions to drop charges of fraud and corruption against a long-time Liberal party contributor, but the opposition to it.<\/p>\n

Traditional political theory teaches that the executive branch of government is responsible to the legislative. It is now clearer than ever that the reverse more nearly applies: members of the Liberal caucus plainly see it as their role, not to hold the government to account, but rather their fellow MPs \u2014 on behalf of the government. When wrongdoing by those high in government is alleged by a pair of whistleblowers, their first thought is to root out the whistleblowers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Omert\u00e0, according to Wikipedia, is “a Southern Italian code of honor and code of silence that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.” It’s also a remarkably appropriate way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,9,53],"tags":[887,908,413],"class_list":["post-47650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-law","category-politics","tag-justintrudeau","tag-liberalparty","tag-scandal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-coy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47651,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47650\/revisions\/47651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}