The shame of Johnston lending his trust to the Trudeau Liberals

National Post, 24 May 2023

He is no longer Governor General, but he deferred to the government nonetheless

It gives me no pleasure that I was right. Others were right too. David Johnston should never have accepted his appointment as “independent special rapporteur” on Chinese election interference. I wrote a few weeks back that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attracts “prominent, accomplished people to government, who later leave diminished, discouraged and damaged.”

At the press conference announcing his “first report,” declining to call for a public inquiry, Johnston was very much diminished, and an admirable legacy has been damaged. One commentator hyperventilated that Johnston’s “reputation is but a smoldering ruin.” That’s not true, but many commentators shared a less condemnatory consensus that Johnston got it wrong.

The essence of Johnston’s report was “trust me, there’s no story here,” as the estimable Andrew Coyne put it. That is presumably why grandees like Johnston are chosen, because they will be trusted.

Yet when Johnston’s report says, in effect, I trust the prime minister and cabinet’s explanation that the security services were at fault, he is lending out his credibility. His report is a cheque written on an account which long ago exhausted its capital of credibility. The cheque will bounce, and Johnston knows it, which is why he already promised to write another cheque — a set of public hearings that he himself will conduct — to cover the loss.

Coyne opted for a different metaphor, namely that Trudeau’s statements to Johnston were not tested against other testimony, as they would in a public inquiry, but were instead “taken in private by his father confessor.”

That image caught my attention, as you can imagine. The father confessor’s role is principally to grant absolution in a sacramental forum so sacred that he may never speak of what anyone told him. The father confessor, who cannot speak in public of what he has heard, could never recommend a public inquiry.

From the other side though, it may be that a father confessor was exactly what Trudeau was looking for. There are penitents, full of contrition, who come seeking mercy for their sins, for which they are willing, even eager, to make reparation.

Yet there are others — Hollywood loves these confessional scenes — where the penitent is not contrite, but seeks to manipulate the rituals of mercy to his own ends. For those who are not contrite, absolution is only play-acting. For those who confess the sins of others, absolution is not needed.

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