• Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “THE LIBERALS HAVE ABANDONED THEIR MORAL PRINCIPLES…and it’s Justin Trudeau’s fault…It is dismaying to me, a political agnostic, that thuggery is now attached to the federal Liberal party. It is appalling to me, a feminist, that so many who claim to respect women, who call themselves feminists — most especially the piously feminist prime minister but all his acolytes in the partisan media — have turned themselves inside-out to rationalize the bullying of female Liberal ministers. Because, readily admitted even, the existential threat of Andrew Scheer at 24 Sussex Drive looms as such a calamity, come the October election, that anything, anything, would be preferable, up to and including the abandonment of all moral principles.”
• Andrew Coyne, National Post: “It’s hard to see what is accomplished by this latest bout of thuggery — not only expelling Wilson-Raybould and Philpott, but revoking their nominations. It seems to be motivated by little more than sheer delight in retribution: vindictiveness for vindictiveness’s sake. And yet they are not one whit diminished by it; only the prime minister is. “
•  Christie Blatchford, National Post: “They’re thugs — the senior people in the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the clerk of the privy council and the nation’s top bureaucrat, the people in the office of Finance Minister Bill Morneau — or so close as to be indistinguishable from them. I refer to their collective behaviour around the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, in particular their relentless effort to strong-arm the deposed attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould…The day after Justin Trudeau pointed to her ongoing presence in cabinet as evidence that should allay any concerns about the propriety of government conduct in relation to SNC and said her presence “spoke for itself,” she quit. “I trust my resignation also speaks for itself,” she said. What a pistol she is.”
• Andrew Coyne, National Post: “[Liberal MPs] knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not…What has agitated Liberal MPs is not the former attorney general’s recording of a conversation she correctly anticipated would be improper and could have guessed would be denied, or her failure to alert the prime minister at whose behest it had taken place (and who could not fail to have been informed of its contents), but rather that she has contradicted and embarrassed the leader. Or rather no: I suspect what truly outrages them is the sight of a person of conscience, unwilling to sacrifice her principles so readily on the altar of partisanship. For those who can still remember what that was like, it must be deeply shaming. For the rest, there is only one principle — blind loyalty to the leader — in which cause they are prepared to sacrifice any number of colleagues.”
• Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail: “Mr. Trudeau, owing to his own inattention to details and sheer arrogance, has created a royal mess. By ousting Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott, he looks more interested in preserving power than upholding the principles he was elected on. It’s not “because it’s 2015” any more: Instead, it’s because it’s 2019, and there’s an election, the Liberals were born to win. Trying, however, to paint Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott as the villains of this story just doesn’t wash. Canadians are smarter, and more principled, than that.”
• Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “It is grotesque, to me, how small and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had become — lifted on the shoulders of his party disciples — trying to make a virtue out of the jettisoning of two women who dared to vouchsafe integrity, falling afoul of the caucus cabal…There was nothing remotely illegal about Wilson-Raybould “covertly” recording her telephone conversation with Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick — what Trudeau classified as “unconscionable.” It’s perfectly licit to record an exchange as long as one person knows it’s happening. Journalists do it all the time, to back up their notes, particularly when the other person on the line might later challenge the veracity of the content.”
• Campbell Clark, Globe and Mail: “It’s not hard to see why most Liberal MPs felt Jody Wilson-Raybould should be booted out of the caucus. There’s no “I” in “team,” but in the Liberal team, there’s a capital “T” for Justin Trudeau. There really wasn’t much more of an explanation than that from Mr. Trudeau, when you get right down to it, for why Ms. Wilson-Raybould and another former minister, Jane Philpott, were kicked out.”
• Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “It seems to me that if someone you work with is pressuring you into doing something you don’t want to do —if you think it is potentially illegal or wildly unethical — secretly taping them isn’t “unconscionable.”Especially if you’ve repeatedly said, to a variety of different people, that you did not feel comfortable with what was being asked of you. And when you tried to tell people, nobody seemed to be listening. No, instead they were telling you, explicitly and implicitly, that you were the one with the problem, that you just don’t seem to “get” how the whole system works. That this is how it’s always been done and you are an outsider if you don’t play by our rules.”
• Andrew MacDougall, Globe and Mail: “For a prime minister positioned as the leader that the West’s liberal world order needs, doesn’t it feel just a little bit Trump-like? If you find that comparison a little tart, think again. Mr. Trudeau and the Liberal caucus have been channelling Donald Trump and the Republican Party, with Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott jointly playing the role of former FBI director James Comey, ejected from the President’s orbit for refusing to play ball on the Russia investigation.”
• Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “How very patronizing the prime minister was — has been throughout, actually, from his diminishment of Wilson-Raybould as “Jody” to his pained forbearance of this wilful woman — in the House on Tuesday, asserting he’d tried to show “patience and understanding,” as one would with an incorrigible child, but heavens, his sufferance had been wasted on so recalcitrant and defiant a Liberal liege, to the point that banishment was the only option to avoid a “civil war.”
• Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “Given what was at stake and what Wilson-Raybould has experienced, none of what she asked for was unreasonable. As she has said from day one, she stood up for the truth. So did Philpott, a medical doctor who held the top portfolios in Trudeau’s government. She told CBC Radio’s The Current she had to resign from cabinet because if a member of the media asked her what she thought, she could not lie, she could not forsake the truth and toe the party line. If she did, how could she face her children, her family? “I chose the truth,” Philpott said. “I chose to act on principles that are so important to the future of our country. That is more important than my political career.”
• Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail: “When the Prime Minister is nonchalant about intervening in the judicial process because, you know, he’s used to getting what he wants, then someone needs to take him aside and explain the facts of life, not to mention constitutional democracy. He may very well have good reasons to think the DPP made the wrong call on SNC-Lavalin. But tough: There is a greater principle at play – the independence of prosecutors to act free of political interference – that cannot be sacrificed simply because, as PMO aide Mathieu Bouchard reportedly told Ms. Wilson-Raybould, “we can have the best policy in the world, but we need to get re-elected.”
• Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “Politics is a dirty rough-and-tumbled business not intended for the faint of heart. Or, apparently, those in possession of a moral compass. There is no redeeming dimension to Trudeau’s brutality. He has dissembled and shammed his way through nearly two months of tortuous squabble. If the Liberal party is in crisis, the seeds were sown in the PMO and a PM of towering hauteur. A phoney feminist to boot.”
• Anthony Furey, Sun: “In recent weeks there have been several stories floated to attempt to smear Wilson-Raybould’s character and suggest she’d made previous errors in judgments. Anyone who has been peddling these smears should now feel deeply ashamed of themselves after this tape has come out.”
• Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “On Wednesday, the Daughters of the Vote filled each seat in the House of Commons as part of the Equal Voice program that was created to attract more women into politics. Trudeau dumped Philpott and Wilson-Raybould the night before the Daughters’ arrival. But as Trudeau stood to address the Daughters, about 40 women stood up and turned their backs on the prime minister. The silent demonstration spoke volumes. If Trudeau was going to exclude Philpott and Wilson-Raybould, they would not listen to his words. They understood exactly what Trudeau’s actions against Philpott and Wilson-Raybould meant. He shut them out. I’m willing to bet a majority of Canadians understood as well.”
• Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star: “For the opposition parties, all of this is a gift. The New Democrats can cite Wilson-Raybould and Philpott as proof that Trudeau is not as progressive as he claims. This should help them in the fall election. By splitting the left-liberal vote, it may in some ridings also inadvertently help Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives. The Conservatives have long made Trudeau himself, as opposed to his often popular policies, the focus of their attack. They must be grabbing themselves with glee. This story will not easily die. It is in the interest of too many to keep it going.”
• Mitch Potter, Toronto Star: “Hold it up to the light at a certain angle and the mess our prime minister finds himself in today seems like the most Canadian of scandals — a terrible, perhaps even politically lethal outcome borne of ridiculously benign intentions all around. Justin Trudeau, his handlers will assure you, was thinking only to protect Canadian jobs. And his now ostracized former attorney general and justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was thinking only of prosecutorial independence…And if trust broke down in the admittedly grey area between jobs and justice, well, that’s really just a formatting error, many would argue. Once the dust settles on the slow-motion SNC-Lavalin affair, the lesson here involves fixing the format — break apart the two-hatted position of AG and JM into separate jobs and voila, no more grey area. But that rose-coloured version of the Liberal government’s slow-motion winter of discontent is finding few buyers. Instead, a bigger problem now is taking hold — the weakening of the prime minister’s personal political brand, a fact sealed this week.”
• Alicia Elliott, Globe and Mail: “Not long after the SNC-Lavalin scandal broke in February, Mr. Trudeau and much of the Liberal Party, which once held Ms. Wilson-Raybould up as a star MP, turned on her. On Tuesday, she was turfed from the Liberal caucus, along with another former cabinet minister, her friend Jane Philpott, one of the few Liberals willing to back Ms. Wilson-Raybould. If a woman who was considered by many to be a “Good Indian” can be used and disregarded this way, what does it mean for those of us who are considered “Bad Indians”? Those of us who have suffered tremendous trauma and loss, such as Tina Fontaine?”
• Amos Barshad, Globe and Mail: “Rasputins [like Gerald Butts] don’t act – they make a powerful few others act. The actions of those powerful few then reverberate. Why don’t they act? Because they lack the abilities to do so. The manipulative pop producer can’t sing or dance. Those grandiose fiction editors can’t write a line of decent stuff themselves. That’s the heartbreak: The dark control always stems from a place of deep and profound longing…The definitive trait of a Rasputin is control over one, or a few, prominent others. And that control must be controversial. Rasputins must have enemies. If their manipulations haven’t won them enemies, well, then their control is not quite untoward enough for the status of true Rasputin.”

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