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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