Trudeau just doesn't get it

So the PM's  former Principal Secretary Gerry Butts gave his testimony before the Justice Committee last Wednesday and Mr. Trudeau gave his "non-apology" press conference last Thursday. Neither staunched the continuing drop in Liberal poll numbers and neither convinced anyone that they were just "discussing options" and weren't aware that Attorney-General Wilson-Raybould had "really" made up her mind when she delivered her message to that effect last September 17 to the Prime Minister.

A CTV poll found that a remarkable 73% of Canadians believed the former Attorney-General after they heard the Butts testimony and Mr. Trudeau's press conference. Neither criticized Wilson-Raybould nor disagreed with her facts of meetings and calls. But they both used the same line about "people having different understandings from the same event." 

But in what could only be termed as news from the“Must be fake news” department, the arrogant audacity of these two continued even in the face of "non-alternative" facts. Aside from the fact that Trudeau and Butts were legally wrong in thinking they could intervene with an Attorney-General after she had made her decision because  a verdict hadn’t yet been rendered, they both stuck to the line that it was about jobs not politics. But both Butts and PCO Clerk Michael Wernick were tripped up in their testimonies when they were asked at the Justice Committee about where they got the potential job loss  number of 9,000. Both tripped over their tongues with Butts muttering something about seeing a Finance Department memo. Adding to their embarrassment however  was an interview with SNC last Wednesday where the engineering giant confirmed on CBC that it has billions in contracts through 2024; that it is bidding on more contracts and that its work around the world dwarfs Canadian revenues. This spurious excuse put up by Mr. Trudeau and his cohorts led many commentators to question why his government has not shown the same concern with the some 50,000 jobs lost in Alberta through the federal mishandling of the energy file over the past 18 months. 

Another remarkable Hollywood-like BOOM moment came an hour after Mr. Trudeau's press conference last Thursday when the Public Prosecution Service of Canada - a part of the federal justice establishment - took the extraordinary step of tweeting a caution to the Prime Minister and the country saying in part "our prosecutors must be.....free from improper influence, including political influence." Mr. Trudeau had made a point of stating how much he understands the importance of judicial independence in his press conference. It would seem the prosecutorial service wanted to make sure that Mr. Trudeau saw it in black and white because it didn't seem as if the service was convinced. They may also have been aiming the message at Mr. Butts who on Wednesday had legal jaws dropping when he said that, "I am not a lawyer but when jobs are at stake it stops being a matter of law and becomes a matter of policy."

They just don't it. It's about the rule of law.