The Trudeau government's revolving door just keeps spinning

National Post, 22 January 2021

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s self-admitted and significant failures in judgment have led to a series of resignations possibly without precedent.

So it turns out that there is a bit more to it than simply following the scientist. Character, competence, civility and the Constitution matter.

With the resignation of the Governor General, Julie Payette, the Trudeau premiership has gone far beyond what anyone would have ever thought possible in our Canadian constitutional monarchy.

Indeed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s self-admitted and significant failures in judgment have led to a series of resignations possibly without precedent in the entire history of Westminster parliamentary democracies.

He fired his attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, for properly resisting political pressure in prosecutorial decisions. She then resigned from cabinet. So, too, did the president of the treasury board, Jane Philpott, in protest of the prime minister’s shabby treatment of Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister. So egregious was the prime minister’s interference with the justice system that his principal secretary, Gerald Butts, also resigned. To cap it off, Michael Wernick, the country’s most senior civil servant as Clerk of the Privy Council, resigned for pressurizing Raybould at the prime minister’s behest. Theretofore it was not really thought possible to bungle things so badly as to lose the clerk.

Then the conflict-of-interest fiasco over the WE paid-volunteers program brought forth the resignation of the finance minister, Bill Morneau.

To lose the governor general though is a history-beating standard. And all because he could not be bothered to learn about allegations that Madame Payette was cruel to her workplace subordinates, allegations already known before she was selected for the vice-regal post.

In fairness, it is possible that neither Trudeau nor anyone else thought to ask her beforehand whether she intended to meet the minimal requirements of representing the Queen, like living in the official residence, giving royal assent to legislation and, on occasion, meeting Canadians. He did have reason to ask her whether she planned to continue her practice of berating, bullying and publicly humiliating her staff. Or maybe he did, and thought it was worth a few days of good publicity.

The single memorable utterance from Payette’s disastrous tenure was in November 2017, when she insulted religious believers in a public speech. Her prejudice and disdain was no surprise, coming as she did from that cramped intellectual world of scientifically brilliant but philosophically illiterate secularists, but it was a shock that she was so mean-spirited in public. Now we know that she was just being true to herself.

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