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The metastasizing WE scandal has many tendrils, like a noxious weed.  It is spreading, inexorably, into the centre of the Trudeau government.  

It may kill it.

The fundamentals are well-known.  Justin Trudeau’s immediate family received hundreds of thousands in secret payments – after he became Prime Minister.  Trudeau thereafter handed a billion-dollar contract to WE, and no one else was permitted to compete for it.

WE spied on Canadian journalists and their families.  It hired Republican operatives to attack its enemies.  It spent hundreds of thousands on lobbyists in the US.  And, late last week, its staff were photographed carrying boxes of files out of its Toronto headquarters – to be taken where, we do not know.

Trudeau’s government has dropped precipitously in the polls, even against the leaderless Conservatives.  Its caucus are anonymously communicating their disgust to journalists, and there is talk of leadership change all over Ottawa.

So WE could topple Trudeau’s minority government.  How can the Opposition ensure that it does?  Ten ways.

1. Voters aren’t as motivated by scandal as journalists and politicos are. They’ve heard cries of “scandal” too often. Leaders and policies matter more, to them. But.

2. …but the role of every war room this writer has run is not to win the election. Our role is always to knock the other side off their agenda, so they can’t showcase their leadership and ideas. You can’t score when you are constantly trying to keep pucks out of the net.

3. That’s the political value of #WEscandal to the opposition. It gives them an opportunity to totally dismantle the Liberal Party’s leadership (the Trudeau brand, which is massive in Canadian politics) and the party’s policies (their response to the pandemic, which has been popular.)

4. The WE scandal is lethal to the Trudeau brand not just because it hurts Justin Trudeau. This seamy, sordid affair also touches his wife, his brother and (critically) his mother. This scandal reaches back in time. It muddies the name of PET and the family’s public service. That is a scandal without precedent.

5. The defining political event of our lives is the pandemic, and how governments respond to it. It’s why Trump will lose – and why Trudeau still could. Kickbacks to Trudeaus? A sole-sourced billion-dollar contract for friends? That means they used the pandemic – their key strength! – to line their pockets. That is unforgiveable and therefore politically deadly.

6. The Liberal Party is dropping in the polls because this scandal is damaging personally (to the Trudeaus) and politically (vis-a-vis the pandemic). Those are gaping wounds. The opposition need to keep picking at them until they’re infected. Make those the ballot questions; nothing else.

7. The smarmy, smug, smirking Keilburgers aren’t on the ballot.  The Trudeau brand, and his response to the pandemic: those are. The Opposition parties need to focus only on those. They need to use every means at their disposal to do so, but not with prosecutors who turn people off (Poilievre, et al.). They need to be disciplined –  which is easier said than done in the Twitter era.

8. Political reputations aren’t shredded in a single day. It takes many days to build one up, and many days to take one down. The Tories, NDP and Bloc need to commit to prosecuting this scandal over the long term.  They need to use their best people, and never let up, even when the media claim to be bored. They must be relentless.

9. The fact that the House isn’t really sitting is completely irrelevant. Political and media hacks love Question Period, but voters do not. They see it as what is wrong with the system, not what’s right. The Opposition must be creative: they need to prosecute the scandal in every possible venue, and not just in the cloistered confines of Parliament Hill. They need to make it ubiquitous.

10. In any war room I’ve led, I tell the young people who work for me the same thing, every day: if we force the other side to play defence 24/7, they can’t score and we can. The Opposition parties need to use this time to showcase their own leadership and policies. Because scandals don’t win elections – but they do create opportunity.

Use it.

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It’s coming. 

October and the October Surprise, that is. It is as inevitable as it is predictable. 

The October Surprise can be capitalized, like that, because it is an actual thing. And it can change everything, politically. 

An October Surprise is usually some event – planned or not – which happens in the days leading up to a big vote. In the United States, presidential elections are always in the first part of November, and October Surprises can thereby affect the outcome of those. They happen a lot. 

An October Surprise happened in 2016, and resulted in Donald Trump seizing the presidency. During the election, Trump had invited his friend Vladimir Putin to hack into Hilary Clinton’s email. Putin did. 

Clinton’s emails thereafter became a controversy, and the FBI even investigated her because of it. They found no wrongdoing and shut down their investigation. Then, two weeks before the presidential vote, the clueless, witless FBI director announced the discovery of more emails, and the re-opening of their investigation. 

Clinton, who – full disclosure, I worked for in two states and her Brooklyn headquarters – had been ahead in every poll. But after the FBI’s October Surprise, she was in big trouble. 

The FBI again announced they were closing their investigation – the day before the vote. But it didn’t matter. It was too late. 

Clinton lost because just 75,000 votes in three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – went to Trump, not her. And there is no doubt in Clinton’s mind why she lost the electoral college: the FBI’s October Surprise. Said Clinton. “[The FBI announcement] raised doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, [and] stopped our momentum.“

October Surprises can do that. In October 1972, when Richard Nixon lied and suggested that “peace was at hand” in Vietnam. When it wasn’t. He won. 

In October 1979, when Ronald Reagan’s election team actively worked to prevent the release of Americans being held hostage by Iran – and engineering their release on the very day President Jimmy Carter relinquished the presidency. 

In October 1992, when an Independent Counsel indicted George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense in the Iran-Contra Affair. Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton. 

And so on and so on. October Surprises can and do happen. 

One is going to happen in 2020. 

Donald Trump is now doing things he swore he would never do. He has started to wear masks – something for which he used to mock Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. He has fired his campaign manager. 

He has started echoing the warnings of scientists about the coronavirus pandemic. He has even cancelled his party’s convention in Florida – something he swore he would never do – because Republicans were going to stay away in droves. 

Why has he done These whiplash-inducing reversals? Why has he done all these things? 

Because he is losing an election that is less than 100 days away. Badly. 

Biden is more trusted by Americans to handle the pandemic – 54 per cent to 34 per cent, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week. Trump is behind Biden nationally – and by double digits in some battleground states. The ones Trump must hold onto to win. 

Mark McKinnon, the Republican strategist who oversaw advertising for President George W. Bush in 2004, acknowledged the pandemic is crushing Trump’s chances at re-election. “He’s wearing a mask and canceling the convention,” said McKinnon. “That’s a head-snapping reversal for a guy who hates to be wrong, hates to back down and, worst of all, hates to be perceived as weak.”

So, if you were a Republican advising Donald Trump – if you were facing not just a loss of the White House but the Senate too – what would you do? How would you prevent a historic wipeout?

On October Surprise, that’s how. And it’s a solution that’s medical, not political. 

For weeks, pharmaceutical companies have been providing Donald Trump with a way out of his dilemma. They’ve been teasing out stories about possible COVID-19 vaccines. Their stock prices have surged dramatically. 

Donald Trump, who pays close attention to the stock markets, is going to stand at a podium sometime in October and announce a cure for coronavirus. He is going to hold up a tiny vial for the TV cameras, and he is going to say the cure was found because his administration funded it, and his administration is going to ensure every American gets it. 

It almost certainly won’t work, but no one will know that until after voting day. 

The October Surprise is a cure for coronavirus that isn’t a cure. 

And it’s coming.  

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•WE “charity” spends hundreds of thousands on US lobbyists

• Fired WE staff confirm they were forced to attend #LPC event

• Ethics Commissioner expands probe into Finance Minister

• Sun reports WE spied on journalists 

…and that’s just today, folks! 

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A few of you let me know that the Wizard – who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, in the Wynne era – was sympathetic to the Keilburgers and critical of Yours Truly. So sad.  So I thought I would provide this one from the archives. It suggests that, if you are looking for someone who knows how to win, you shouldn’t ever look to this guy – he’s advised three Liberal parties. And he’s wrecked all three.

A week to go, and I have already started to hear some of the excuses being road-tested by the Wizard and the Board. They know they are going to lose.  So they are readying their rationalizations.

Here’s ten of them, which I may turn into a Hill Times column.  Feel free to add more in comments.

1. “We’ve been in power for more than a decade, we knew winning again was unlikely.” That so? Really? Except: the same excuse could’ve been trotted out in 2014, when it was also more than a decade in power. And: Stephen Harper didn’t drive his party in the ground. Christy Clark won a minority.  Bill Davis ruled Ontario forever. And so on.
2. “Female political leaders never get re-elected.  Misogyny, etc.” Uh-huh.  Except: Nancy Pelosi, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Indira Gandhi, et al.  They all did okay.  Misogyny isn’t solely a Canadian problem.
3. “Kathleen is gay.  She was defeated by homophobia.”  Gotcha.  Explain: 2014.
4. “This is the former Premier’s fault.  Gas plants, blah blah blah.  Wasn’t our fault.”  This one drives me nuts.  (I mean, Kathleen Wynne would still be a little-known school board trustee were it not for Dalton McGuinty.)  Besides, it isn’t just disrespectful, it’s disingenuous: from the perspective of Joe and Jane Frontporch, folks, it’s all one Ontario Liberal Party, you know?  Voters remember you worked for Dalton, Kathleen.
5. “Hiding Kathleen wouldn’t have worked.  She’s the leader, we needed to have her front and centre.”  Gotcha.  A former Ontario Liberal leader, Lyn McLeod, experienced precisely the same problem in 1995: she was dragging her party down.  So, McLeod and her senior people made the (tough, principled) decision to take her off the air for the final two weeks.  They held onto 30 seats as a result.  Why didn’t Wynne do likewise?
6. “We ran an ethical and scandal-free government.  We were sunk by Dalton’s scandals.”  Repeat after me: it’s never the break-in, it’s the cover up.  Example One: Jean Chrétien resigned in December 2003, and the daily headlines were then still screaming about the so-called “sponsorship scandal.”  Chrétien’s approval number?  Sixty per cent.  Example Two:  five years earlier, in December 1998, Bill Clinton became the most popular president in the history of U.S. polling, at 73 per cent approval – all of which came after the Lewinsky scandal, and his impeachment in the House of Representatives.  Scandal isn’t what sinks you: per Harry Truman, it’s trying to pass the buck about scandal.
7. “After fifteen years, there was no way we were going to win again.  We decided to take the hit so a new leader could start fresh.”  Really?  Seriously?  Next week, I will be presenting y’all with quantitative evidence showing that this is hooey: the Ontario Liberal brand was popular, the Ontario Liberal record was popular, the Ontario Liberal caucus was popular.  What wasn’t popular was the leader.  She needed to talk a proverbial walk in the proverbial snow.  She didn’t.
8. “Our internal polling actually showed that we were going to do far worse.  We are pleased where we ended up.”  You are forgiven if that one in any way reminds you of this.
9. “Trudeau has hurt the Liberal brand everywhere.  He pulled down our numbers.”  Did Trudeau take on water after India? Yes.  Does he have both sides of the ideological spectrum (unfairly) mad at him after the decision to buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline?  Yes.  But the notion that Trudeau is in any way responsible for Wynne’s disastrous campaign is absurd.  If anything, her numbers pulled down his.
10. “We’ll be back.”  Well, some of us will be.  But Kathleen Wynne and the Wizard and the Board?

They won’t be.

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The coronavirus pandemic is one of the biggest events of our collective lifetimes. You don’t have to take a poll. It just is.

Millions of Canadians without work. Companies going bankrupt. Families in crisis. And, of course, 110,000 of us infected with Covid-19, and more than 9,000 dead.

It has been a cataclysm. It has been a disaster on an unprecedented scale. It has been, per Yeats, things falling apart, and a center that cannot hold. Anarchy, loosed upon our world.

Compared to the Americans – our national pastime – we Canadians are doing better, a lot better. They have nearly four million people infected. They have more than 140,000 dead – many, if not most, due to the delusional psychosis that has seized the death cult that is the Republican Party. Led, as it is, by a monkey with a machine-gun.

So, we Canadians compare ourselves to the United States, which is now more a charnel-house than a country. We feel better about ourselves, pat ourselves on our backs, and then go about the tightrope-walking that is life during a lethal pandemic.

But we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t get too cocky. Because there are other measurements to be applied to our leaders. Not just comparisons of body counts.

Corruption, for instance.

Justin Trudeau has been called corrupt many times in the past. When, for example, he secretly accepted gifts from a lobbyist – traveling on the lobbyist’s helicopter to the lobbyist’s private island. When he was caught, the Liberal leader shrugged. “We,” he said, actually using that pronoun to describe  himself, “don’t see an issue.”

The Ethics Commissioner sure did. She ruled that Trudeau has broken conflict of interest rules four times by succumbing to the Aga Khan’s influence-peddling.

That was followed by the LavScam scandal, wherein Trudeau, his Finance Minister and their underlings pressured the Minister of Justice on 22 separate occasions – to give a sweetheart deal to a corrupt corporate donor to Trudeau’s party. When the Globe and Mail reported what he had done,Trudeau angrily denied it all.

But the Ethics Commissioner again found Trudeau guilty. The Liberal leader had “flagrantly” violated conflict of interest laws, said the Commissioner, by attempting to stop a prosecution of the Quebec-based SNC Lavalin. Said he: “The evidence showed there were many ways in which Mr. Trudeau, either directly or through the actions of those under his direction, sought to influence the attorney general.”

In both cases, Justin Trudeau solemnly assured Canadians that he’d learned he lesson. He promised to avoid all conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Canadians believed him, and re-elected him in 2019.

And now, he is at it again. This time, it isn’t just his Finance Minister and senior staff implicated, either. This time, his wife, his mother and his brother are alleged to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the serpentine WE organization. His Finance Minister’s children, meanwhile, received jobs from WE.

While seamy and sordid, none of that is necessarily fatal. What makes it lethal, politically, is the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister voting, one, to hand WE a billion-dollar contract without competition.

Two, to do so without disclosing their conflict of interest to cabinet.

Three, to do so without acknowledging that their families had been the recipients of WE’s largesse.

And, four, to do all that in the middle of a pandemic, when Canada is facing a $343 billion deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s that last one that makes WE-gate much worse than LavScam or the Aga Khan scandal: rich people – the Trudeaus, the Morneaus and the cultists behind the WE “charity” – seen to be getting richer during a pandemic. When everyone else is getting measurably poorer.

When Canadians are losing their jobs, losing their homes, Margaret Trudeau is getting a quarter of a million dollars to give some speeches. That, to many of us, is despicable.

Still, some Liberal partisans shrug. During a pandemic, do such things matter? In the big scheme of things, does the $352,000 the Trudeaus received even compare to the billions Canadians have received from their federal government to help them through an unprecedented crisis?

It matters.

When this writer had the honor and privilege of working for Jean Chrétien, we’d frequently hear stories about wealthy interests offering our boss a room at their mansions while he was touring the country. No charge. Just stay for the night, they’d tell him.  In most cases, they were just being hospitable.

But Chrétien would always say no. Back at the office, he’d tell us why: “Those little things add up. They create the wrong impression. So I stayed at a motel.”

And therein lies the moral of the tale, the one that Justin Trudeau has not learned and never will: big political graves are dug with tiny shovels.

With the WE scandal, Justin Trudeau is again digging his.

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Entitlements.

You remember that word, don’t you? David Dingwall, a Liberal politician, once said that he was “entitled to his entitlements.”

Dingwall uttered those fateful words before a Parliamentary committee, convened to determine if – as President of the Royal Canadian Mint – Dingwall had abused his expense account.

He hadn’t. Two audits concluded he hadn’t. But, when questioned about why he should get a severance when he voluntarily resigned from his position at the Mint, that’s what Dingwall said. “I’m entitled to my entitlements.”

He wasn’t wrong, but it was a dumb thing to say. The Conservatives used a clip of Dingwall saying those words in their election ads. They won the election.

Entitlements are the root cause of all corruption. People of lesser means decide they work hard, that they are unappreciated, so they sometimes start dipping into the proverbial cookie jar. They take home stuff that doesn’t belong to them, because they feel entitled.

Rich people are a bit different. They think they are entitled, too, but they think that way simply because they are rich. They breathe a more rarefied air, and their Gucci slippers don’t alight on the same ground as the rest of us. They pocket things that they shouldn’t, because they genuinely believe they are superior beings. And their superiority entitles them to entitlements.

So. Many years after David Dingwall said what he said, entitlements are back. Specifically, entitlements for the entitled.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his mother and brother are rich. So is the family of his Finance Minister, Bill Morneau. By any reasonable standard, they’re all rich. They’re millionaires. They have way more money than you and I do.

But there they were, those rich people, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars – or getting jobs – from a charity, WE. They got paid to make speeches and appear at WE events, where kids in matching T-shirts would applaud their every utterance.

Now, the rest of us volunteer with charities. We donate our time to charities. We don’t, however, expect to get paid $352,000 by a charity. But the Trudeaus did, and were.

Over a period of years, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party got very, very close to Marc and Craig Kielburger’s cult-like WE organization. If the Trudeau Liberals were the Church of Scientology, WE was their Sea Org.

When they won power, Messrs. Trudeau and Morneau sat in on a cabinet meeting and voted to give Marc and Craig’s WE thing close to a billion dollars to run a program that the federal public service was more than qualified to run. They voted to give Marc and Craig and Co. almost a billion dollars sole-source – meaning, with no competition.

Did they disclose to cabinet that their families had received jobs and lots of money from WE? We don’t know. Cabinet discussions are secret.

But we’ll know soon enough. There are multiple investigations already underway into this stinking, fetid mess, and they will undoubtedly find multiple conflicts of interest. The RCMP, who are also now looking at WE-gate, will find it difficult not to launch a formal criminal investigation.

It’s all very sad and all very unnecessary.

Some years ago, you see, before they became wealthy and powerful, Marc and Craig Kielburger came to see this writer in his office. They were smart and articulate and passionate kids, back then. They fastened their unblinking eyes on me and said they wanted to stop child labour.

They also, as it turned out, wanted introductions to then-PM Jean Chrétien and some of Chretien’s ministers – to get funding, to get influence.

Even back then, even as teenagers, Craig and Marc were on the hunt for the famous and the powerful. It was off-putting and a bit creepy.

I said I’d try and help them, but I never did. They gave me a couple of their books and left.

What happened to those two boys who came to see me, who wanted to stop child labour? How did their little charity turn into something else entirely, with a massive real estate portfolio, with tentacles reaching schools across Canada, and allegations of racism and abuse of power, and a scandal that will not disappear? How did all that happen?

Entitlements, mostly. The entitled always want their entitlements.

And Marc and Craig Kielburger, even back when they were boys, knew how to get the entitled to do their bidding.

With, you know, entitlements.

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