Justin Trudeau, my how you've changed

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces that Canada will take part in an international lunar space station project at the Canadian Space Agency headquarters Thursday, February 28, 2019 in St. Hubert, Que. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz)

Imagine you’re Justin Trudeau.

The SNC-Lavalin scandal has been battering your government for weeks. Your story keeps shifting. The usually docile media aren’t letting it rest. Even a thousand coordinated tweets about the positive impact of the Canada Child Benefit can’t change the channel.

On the contrary, l’affair SNC — now christened LavScam — is picking up steam.

You’ve been forced to accept the resignation of your good friend and top advisor, Gerry Butts, who showed himself the door despite doing absolutely nothing wrong on SNC. Your boy Buttsy jumped on the SNC grenade to spare others the damage.

Only Butts missed the grenade. Completely.

Even worse, Jody Wilson-Raybould — i.e. the grenade-launcher — is now before the Justice Committee. She’s (relatively) free to speak and she is letting loose. And now the shrapnel is everywhere, and everyone is bleeding.

You’re bleeding. Your chief of staff is bleeding. Your Quebec advisor is bleeding. Your policy guy is bleeding. Your big-spending, do-nothing finance minister is bleeding. Your finance minister’s chief of staff is bleeding. And the “non-partisan” clerk of the Privy Council — i.e. your own personal pick for the post? Well, Michael Wernick is soiled. Comprehensively soiled. And bleeding.

It’s riveting testimony. The media are typing as if their lives depend on it. The cable guys are running the full hearing. And ordinary people are watching, because it’s not every day you see a member of a government strafe its leadership. Strafe you.

Only strafe isn’t the word. It’s more of a shiv. There is no emotion or hysteria. There is ice in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s veins and a steely determination as she coolly, calmly and credibly outlines the myriad ways your political and bureaucratic apparatus attempted to impress upon her independent mind the need to have another think on SNC, despite her repeated attempts to everyone — including you — that her thinking on the matter was all done.

You’re watching this all go down, and it is devastating. Your government is in peril. You’re in peril. You’re staring a return to your career of part-time drama teaching right in the face.

And so you decide it’s time to fight back. Because the cast of fifth-rate clowns you sent to fill the Liberal seats at the justice committee certainly didn’t do any fighting back. They not only missed the grenades, they picked them up, played with them, and then didn’t even realize when they went off in their faces.

But that’s all right. You’re Justin Trudeau. Mr. Sunny Ways. Mr. Hope and Hard Work. You got this. So you wheel yourself out to ‘push back’ against Wilson-Raybould’s allegations.

Only you don’t push back.

You don’t counter Wilson-Raybould’s facts and recollections with any of your own. You don’t dispute what was said, even about your alleged direct personal involvement, other than to say you disagree with Wilson-Raybould’s “characterization” of events.

And it stinks.

It stinks as you moan about a difficult couple of weeks because of “internal disagreements.” It stinks as you reference your success in making it easier to die, and your success in making it easier to get high. It stinks as you talk about your job being to stand up for jobs and pensions, to stand up for Canadians, and for Canadian workers, and all in an overly dramatic tone that suggests that no other prime minister has ever had that in their job description. It stinks as you speak about anything other than what Canadians need to hear from you.

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Source: Andrew MacDougall | MSN