, 04.02.2019 11:36 AM

Justice and Justin

There was a moment, during Justin Trudeau’s saturnalian March 7 LavScam press conference, where the Prime Minister waxed poetic.

He grew misty-eyed. He looked up from his notes. He sounded wistful.

He loved Justice, he said. He really did. He and his Dad both did. “The files that were closest to his heart are also for me. And one is the justice file.”

Justice – which Justin Trudeau hadn’t mentioned all that often during his three-and-a-half-years in the big chair – was now super-duper important. It was everything. It was a “file” that “has always been one of particular importance and interest to me. It’s always been very close to my heart.”

His heart! The mind reels, at such times. Our souls swoon.

So, stay with me, here. Just for a minute.

At that moment, justice was a baseball, kind of, but in a good way. In an instant, we were collectively whisked back to the Nineties, to that iconic scene in Field of Dreams – the one where Kevin Costner asks his deceased Dad if he wants to play catch, and every grown man in the theatre starts to sniffle. Except, in Justin’s case, the baseball was justice – stamped Rule of Law, so we don’t miss the point – and he and Pierre were lobbing it back and forth, so great was their love of justice.

That’s what the young Trudeau was after, anyway. That’s what he wanted to evoke. Justice, Dad, better times.

Except, you know: nobody believes it. Nobody believes him, either. Two-thirds of Canadians, say the pollsters, are like those folks in Field of Dreams who keep showing up at Kevin Costner’s farm and they don’t see a damn thing. They don’t see anything magical or wonderful or poetic. They just see what is really there.

Which, in the LavScam case, is a seething, stinking dumpster overflowing with lies, and cover-ups, and smears. And, standing beside it all, is a Prime Minister who doesn’t seem so cool and hip anymore. He just looks like another grasping, grimy politician, one who will say and do anything to save his hide.

Because he’s losing. An Angus Reid poll, released Thursday, suggested he now may be as many as ten percentage points behind Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives nationally. And, as my smart NDP pal Karl Belanger reminded me, Trudeau’s personal approval numbers now lag behind another politician: Donald Trump.

And it is all because of justice.

Distilled down to its base elements, you see, LavScam is about justice. Not 9,000 jobs that SNC-Lavalin’s CEO says were never in jeopardy. Not Article Five of the OECD anti-bribery convention, which Trudeau’s government has violated. Not anything else: justice.

In our system of justice, no one – not even a Prime Minister – is allowed to ring up a judge or prosecutor and tell them what to do. That is against the law. It is obstruction of justice. It is the absence of justice.

Also unjust: the decision of someone on Team Trudeau to violate the sacrosanct judicial nomination process, simply to get back at former Attorney-General Jody Wilson Raybould. To do this, one of Trudeau’s faceless factotums leaked secret information about a Supreme Court of Canada nominee to compliant reporters at the Canadian Press and CTV News.

The nominee, who Wilson-Raybould reportedly preferred, was a social conservative, the leaker hissed. And Jody Wilson-Raybould favoured him – and Justin Trudeau opposed him, because he was insufficiently progressive, said the leaker.

Except: it wasn’t true. It was a lie. The judge was a moderate. And he wasn’t dropped from Justin Trudeau’s list – he removed himself from it, to care for a wife suffering from breast cancer.

So, is that justice? Is that just? Is it acceptable to further wound a family battling cancer – just to defame an indigenous woman who got a little too uppity?

But Jody Wilson-Raybould isn’t the only indigenous woman Justin Trudeau holds in contempt. No, there are others, as it turns out.

This week, the mask slipped yet again, and we saw Justin Trudeau mocking a young indigenous woman at a Liberal Party event in Toronto.

As his audience of well-to-do white men laughed, Justin Trudeau jeered an indigenous female protestor, saying “thanks for your donation” as she was hustled away by his hulking bodyguards.

She was there to protest the mercury poisoning of her people at Grassy Narrows, which Justin Trudeau had solemnly promised to remedy. And about which he has done precious little.

“Thanks for your donation.” Is that the “real change” Justin Trudeau said he’d give Canadians in 2015? Is that his promised reconciliation with indigenous people? Is that in any way just, or justice?

You know the answer already.

And you also know that Justin Trudeau wouldn’t know “justice” if it bit him on his privileged white ass.

13 Comments

  1. Walter says:

    JWR, and Jane Philpott, appear to have grossly over-estimated the morals of the Liberal Party.

    They likely suspected their colleagues would have sided with them in their drive to maintain integrity. Unfortunately, it appears the virtually every MP fell on the wrong side of the ethical line. I suspect they know that an apathetic public is likely to forgive Trudeau, because his qualities are little changed from what they were 4 years ago – namely that he has nice hair.

  2. Oscar Block says:

    I just listened to CTV talking about the notes Gerry Butts released.

    I find it odd that he suddenly comes up with “relevant” notes only after JWR releases notes etc. It begs the question, why not just open everything up to a public inquiry then? Clear the air, so to speak.

    Is there something else we don’t know about they don’t want to see the light of day?

    I don’t know Gerry, or that much about him. My impressions so far, after watching him testify to the JC and now this, is that he is a somewhat slippery fellow.

    But that’s just me..

  3. the real Sean says:

    PET would have been extremely impressed…… and very supportive……. of JWR.

    • Montréalaise says:

      Lately I’ve been wondering what PET would think of his eldest son in all of this. I’ve read that PET was somewhat disappointed that JT hadn’t inherited his intellect – apparently he wanted his teenage son to read literature and philosophy as a teenager, as he had done, but JT only read comic books.

      • Vancouverois says:

        Hey, there’s nothing wrong with comic books! These days, they can be a true art form.

        But… yeah. JT is clearly not an intellectual.

  4. Sean says:

    Once bit, twice shy goes the old adage. And the imposter has bit us countless times. So what’s changed?

    For two years a proponderance of pundits looked the other way and only a few were strong enough and ethical enough to swim against the tide. But now things have reversed and the imposter’s mask has been ripped off his face for the entire nation to see. And this is what your excellent article has done-ripped the imposter’s mask off and exposed a personality that manipulates, cons, and deceives.

    Well done, Mr. Kinsella.

  5. Leo Fleming says:

    That’s the thing. None of these people had any more right to be calling her and telling her what to do than you or I.

    It was clear from the call that Wernick didn’t understand what she was saying. He didn’t understand that JWR was accusing him and the PMO of interfering with the course of justice. Wernick kept bringing it back to the fact that she wouldn’t be interfering or obstructing justice if she just did what they wanted. And that was obviously the message coming from the PMO. These people seem to be a level below in understanding of where I would have thought they would be.

    • Vancouverois says:

      I don’t think it’s that Wernick and the PMO didn’t understand.

      It’s that they just didn’t care.

    • Fred from BC says:

      “It was clear from the call that Wernick didn’t understand what she was saying.”

      Maybe. Or, he did….and just didn’t care…

    • Chris says:

      They (still) haven’t bothered to read their own Legislation that they sneakily passed in the 2018 Budget Implementation Omnibus Bill. I guess that’s what happens when the “Justice” Committee can’t even be bothered to study Justice legislation.

      “We don’t want to debate legalities anymore.”

  6. MitchB says:

    Even John Mitchell, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt didn’t screw up the Watergate cover-up as badly as JT and the PMO all-star circus. And they went to jail…

  7. Joe says:

    I am thinking that JT and the PMO were setting up JWR.
    If for some reason the DPA blew up and embarrassed the Liberals, then JT would say it was all JWRs decision.

  8. Joseph says:

    So let me get this straight?
    If a caucus member makes an ethical violation they should be kicked out of the liberal caucus.
    What happens after the fifth ethical violation?

    Asking for a friend.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.