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There’s a reason why Katie Telford is testifying before a Parliamentary committee on Friday, and why Gerald Butts is not.

Telford is smarter than Butts.

He, after all, had to resign in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. He said some things to Jody Wilson Raybould that he shouldn’t have said, and he had to resign in disgrace.

But here’s the interesting thing: Katie Telford also said some very unhelpful things during that scandal. She talked about engineering some fake news to protect her boss, Justin Trudeau.

But Telford didn’t have to resign. Butts did.

When you consider that Gerald Butts has been one of Justin Trudeau’s closest friends since they both attended McGill University, that is noteworthy. Telford only met Trudeau much later on, when she had abandoned the Ontario Liberal team in Toronto and moved up the 401 to Ottawa.

But she survived. And Justin Trudeau’s closest friend didn’t.

Why?

Three reasons, all of which need to be kept in mind when Telford sits down to testify about another Trudeau government scandal, the Chinese election interference one.

One, Katie Telford is not going to make a big mistake.  She has testified before Parliamentarians probing other scandals in the past. In every case, she did not lose her cool, she did not make a mistake, she did not even break into a sweat.

She knows that sounding as boring as possible is the best strategy in these situations. So count on her to be boring and avoid any pratfalls.

Two, she has more facts than the Parliamentarians. As the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of Canada, Telford would be the only political aide who has sat in on national security briefings with the Prime Minister. She is the only one who knows the full truth and nothing but the truth.

Based upon some fine reporting by Global News and The Globe and Mail and others, we know – or we strongly suspect – that Trudeau and Telford were told about Chinese election criminality in both 2019 and 2021. And we know – or we strongly suspect – that neither of them did anything about it.

So, yes, she knows more than your garden-variety Member of Parliment. But, in fairness to her, it is against the law for her to disclose national security matters in public.

She would go to jail if she did so. So she may know a lot – but she can’t say a lot when she appears to testify.

Three, she isn’t going anywhere. When the last helicopter lifts the last Trudeau government survivor from the roof of the Langevin Block, like in Saigon in 1975,  Telford almost certainly will be the one leaving last.

She has been discreet, she has been low profile, and she has been – more than anyone else – unwaveringly loyal to Justin Trudeau. If she wants five Senate appointments for herself, not just one, Justin Trudeau will give them to her.

She can ask for anything her heart desires, in fact, because she has been able to do what Gerald Butts could not.

Namely, stay out of trouble, stay quiet, and stay loyal.

Expecting fireworks when she testifies tomorrow?

You will be disappointed.

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When the news broke that the board and leadership of the Trudeau Foundation had resigned, en masse, Justin Trudeau – he whose surname is affixed to said Foundation – was all sad face.

Alighting in Toronto for a meeting about something or the other, Himself sniffed: “It is a shame to see the level of toxicity and political polarization that is going on in our country these days.”

Dramatic pause.

“Those people who are trying to get short-term political gain by increasing polarization and partisanship in this country, by launching completely unfounded and ungrounded attacks against charities or foundations, must not succeed.”

Well, if that’s what “those people” are doing, they’re in fact succeeding, big guy. The Foundation’s board and the CEO all resigned, but not because of “completely unfounded and ungrounded attacks.” Nope.

Nor did they all quit, as the Foundation itself claimed – in a press statement that was as full of self-pity as it was devoid of self-awareness – because the “political climate…has put a great deal of pressure on the Foundation’s management and volunteer Board of Directors, as well as on our staff and our community.”

Well, no, folks. You all had to resign because of you. You, and your apparent inability to conduct business with a modicum of ethics and morality.

So, if the “political climate” has changed, it is because of the aforementioned Justin Trudeau. No one in Canada has done as much to dismantle the good reputation enjoyed by the Trudeau Foundation – and it possessed such a reputation, at one time – than the boy-man whose name is affixed to it: Trudeau.

But that fact always escapes the Trudeau-era Liberals, doesn’t it? When you bona fide oppose one of their policies, they will say you are a mouth-breathing troglodyte. When you critique them, you are accused of being against Canada itself. When you inevitably raise your voice, because you are frustrated that they never change and never listen, you are called racist.

A pithy illustration of this belief that Canada is the Liberal Party and the Liberal Party is Canada was found, comme toujours, on Twitter. After the Trudeau Foundation’s board resigned, having been caught covertly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a man who now very much resembles a Chinese agent, an otherwise thoughtful Liberal MP, Anthony Housefather, tweeted:

“WE charity improved the lives of thousands of kids. The #TrudeauFoundation has helped thousands of students. While charities need to be accountable & merit scrutiny, politicizing them & turning them into punching bags cannot be what is best for Canada.”

See that? To express legitimate concern – about the Chinese regime’s thuggery and criminality, about the willingness of certain elite Canadians to smile and accept graft – is to be against “what is best for Canada.”

Again: no. We’re not.

We – the entire Canadian media, the 72 per cent of Conservatives and 71 per cent of Liberals, respectively, who want a public inquiry into Chinese election malfeasance – are Canada, actually.

We believe, too, that the casual corruption of the Trudeau cabal – as seen with the Aga Khan, with SNC-Lavalin, with the WE “charity,” and now with the Trudeau Foundation – reveal a pattern of casual corruption that is replete with self-dealing and palm-greasing.

So who is to blame for the collapse in trust of government, now hovering – pollsters say – around 80 per cent of us?

It’s not the pesky news media. It’s not the political Opposition in the House of Commons. It’s not the federal ethics commissioner, who quit a few weeks ago, telling the National Post: “The public has to believe that ethics are taken seriously, and they have yet to have any big evidence of that since 2018.”

“2018.” Which precisely coincides, Mr. Trudeau, with your term in office. With you, and your cavalier and craven approach to the most basic rules of conduct.

Want to know why charities and foundations are no longer trusted, sir, and why they’ve been “turned into punching bags,” quote unquote?

Look in a mirror.

You did it.

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Charging Donald J. Trump with crimes — as he was, Tuesday, with nearly three dozen offences — was a really, really bad idea.

The prosecutor is a card-carrying Democrat — so the charges look like political payback. And the unprecedented decision to criminally charge a former Republican president, whose career and fortunes were decidedly on the wane until he was indicted, has unified Republicans like never before.

The State of New York vs. Donald J. Trump may well guarantee Trump the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, in fact.

And that’s why — in a dark, dastardly and Machiavellian kind of way — it may be a stroke of political genius. Legally doomed to failure, yes.

But politically brilliant. Here’s why.

Last year, in the lead up to the midterm elections, Democrats were trailing everywhere. President Joe Biden was extremely unpopular, Democrats were fighting amongst themselves in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the party did not seem to have a clear message on the economy.

And the U.S. economy was not doing well, thanks to surging inflation.

The only group that seem to be more unpopular than the Democrats, in fact, were Trump-affiliated MAGA Republicans.

So, Democrats got to work doing something that had never really been done before out in the open: supporting Republicans who were seen as close to Donald Trump. The ones who denied the 2020 election results, the ones who said the most outrageous things, the ones who embraced the most extreme policies.

As political strategies go, it did not seem very ethical or moral. After all, how can you claim to object to Donald Trump when you are helping out Donald Trump’s closest allies?

But help them they did. In New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, Arizona, Democrats quietly schemed to fundraise for MAGA Republicans, run ads promoting them, and get their names on the ballot. They spent millions doing so.

Incredibly, the dirty-tricky strategy worked. NPR analyze the results following the midterm elections and concluded: “In high-profile races where Democratic candidates or groups successfully used the strategy during the primaries, all of the Republicans they helped have either lost or are trailing, two days after Election Day.”

Added NPR: “The strategy seems to have paid off.”

Many Dems didn’t care. “It’s dishonorable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s just damn wrong,” said Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips. But the results told a different story: boosting Trump-linked MAGA types in Senate, House and gubernatorial races worked, big time.

And, quietly, Democrats may well be doing it again, with the biggest MAGA Trump Republican of all: Donald Trump himself.

They know that Biden isn’t nearly as popular as they’d like. They know he’s seen as too old by too many voters. They know Biden could lose, badly, to Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

So, they’re putting their Democratic fingers on the scale, and quietly scheming to get their biggest asset back on the presidential ballot.

That is, Donald J. Trump — the guy who will likely win in a court of law.

But who will almost certainly lose in the court of public opinion as a result.

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