Trudeau will drag Johnston down, like he does everyone else
National Post, 26 March 2023
Johnston would be wise not to spend any more time than necessary in proximity to a premiership that has been problematic for so many prominent people
OTTAWA — I admire the Right Hon. David Johnston. Which is why I was disappointed that he accepted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s invitation to serve as a “special rapporteur” regarding the Chinese regime’s interference in our elections. Trudeau has an uncanny ability to drag those around him down.
Our prime minister carries a strain of the same contagion that former U.S. president Donald Trump is infected with: continued contact with the man contaminates. Trudeau’s rise anticipated Trump’s, both making celebrity status a potent political force. They both inherited wealth and a privileged path through life from their fathers.
There are differences, of course, with Trump boorish and Trudeau suave, Trump doing real estate deals and Trudeau teaching drama, Trump featured in professional wrestling while Trudeau opted for celebrity boxing. Yet a key similarity is that both attract prominent, accomplished people to government, who later leave diminished, discouraged and damaged.
Consider Trudeau’s list. He has, in various scandals, managed to lose a governor general and a clerk of the privy council, which is remarkable considering those nonpartisan offices were thought to be beyond the reach of political figures to compromise.
He has lost a finance minister, attorney general, president of the treasury board and his own principal secretary. Even the commissioner of the RCMP was sullied by her contact with Trudeau’s ministry. During the kidnapping of the two Michaels, he lost his ambassador to China. It may be that U.S. President Joe Biden made his trip to Ottawa brief so as to avoid a similar calamity.
Will Johnston be able to avoid such a fate?
Recently, my colleague Colby Cosh detailed the whiplash experienced by John Ibbitson, a political columnist at the Globe and Mail, who first heaped laudations upon the Johnston appointment and then threw himself into reverse when he discovered that the wiser heads at his own newspaper disagreed.
Ibbitson got it wrong because he saw Johnston’s remarkable record of public service and somehow missed the obvious point that Trudeau was manifestly calling upon an old friendship so he could borrow that record for himself. And because Ibbitson was, unlike the Post’s Terry Glavin, unwilling to carefully examine Johnston’s actual record on China.
Belatedly, Ibbitson realized that instead of Johnston’s record burnishing Trudeau’s, the latter might instead tarnish the former. “It’s a damn shame that the reputation of someone as honourable as David Johnston should be brought into question through the prime minister’s efforts to avoid responsibility,” wrote Ibbitson on second thought.
Of course it’s a damn shame. That shame, like a great blot, has been leaching out from the prime minister for years to the high offices of state. It was only 18 months ago that Jody Wilson-Raybould’s memoir revealed this summation of her experience in Trudeau’s ambiance:
“I wish that I had never met you,” she told him to his face, confessing to being upset with herself for ever thinking that Trudeau was an “honest and good person, when, in truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it.”
My fervent hope is that Johnston does not come to similar regrets.
The subsequent resignation from the Liberal caucus of Toronto MP Han Dong makes Johnston’s job easier. The allegation that a sitting MP from the government caucus took the side of the Chinese Communists in the kidnapping of Canadian citizens is such an enormity that only an open, transparent inquiry can clear his name.
Continue reading at the National Post.