Liberal casualties keep piling up
National Post, 28 September 2023
Is there anyone left to drive the bus? Can the bus even be driven with so many bodies underneath it?
Pity the columnist who lingers while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lurches from crisis to catastrophe.
Last week, fresh off his second disastrous trip to India, the prime minister dropped by The New York Times to chat up his old chums after his visit to the UN. The interview was noteworthy, but no one could properly note it as the implosion of the Speaker of the House of Commons was rising on the horizon.
It’s time to update the list of Trudeau casualties. He lost an attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, who resigned from cabinet after she was punished for properly resisting political pressure in prosecutorial decisions. The president of the treasury board, Jane Philpott, resigned in solidarity, shocked at the shabby treatment of Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister.
The same abuse of power for the benefit of Montreal’s SNC-Lavalin cost Trudeau his principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and Michael Wernick, the country’s most senior civil servant as Clerk of the Privy Council. It was previously thought impossible to botch things so badly as to lose a clerk.
SNC-Lavalin, by the way, changed its name this month to wash off the stench that clings to the company for the kind of behaviour Trudeau interfered to excuse.
Then Trudeau lost his finance minister, Bill Morneau, in a conflict of interest scandal which, as collateral damage, led to the WE charity effectively ceasing operations in Canada.
Could it possibly get worse? Trudeau then lost a governor general, Julie Payette, who was allegedly cruel and venomous to her workplace subordinates, something already known before Trudeau recommended her appointment.
Surely a highly respected, octogenarian former governor general would be safe in retirement? Trudeau called him back into service to put a black mark on that long career. Another resignation.
All the while, over in the military, there was unprecedented turmoil in the most senior ranks, all presided over by a defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, who falsely bragged that he was the “architect” of Canada’s biggest military operation in Afghanistan. He belatedly apologized and survived a vote of non-confidence in the House. Trudeau shuffled him out in 2021.
And don’t forget our ambassador to China, John McCallum, who was cut loose for taking China’s side in the case of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive who was detained by Canada, an action for which Beijing retaliated by kidnapping the Two Michaels.
The tally is: attorney general, president of the treasury board, principal secretary, clerk of the privy council, finance minister, two chiefs of defence staff, ambassador to China, a current governor general, a former governor general.
Who’s left? The Speaker of the House of Commons.
Out went Anthony Rota on Tuesday. Is there anyone left to drive the bus? Can the bus even be driven with so many bodies underneath it?
Where does a Trudeau in such travail go? Last week to The New York Times. The prime minister fondly remembers the long love letter the NYT published just days after his swearing-in in 2015, back in the heady days when the most pressing issue was to make time for the photographer from Vogue.
The NYT styled Trudeau’s election in 2015 as “nothing less than an existential struggle over what it means to be Canadian.” It turned out that the actual existential struggles would be for those who would rise to prominent office under him.
Trudeau’s remarks last week were startling and would have commanded national attention had he not been hiding from the fallout over the unspeakable embarrassment of the Speaker.
Continue reading at the National Post.