The eminent biographer, Robert Caro, was quoted in recent days about the effect of power. Does it necessarily corrupt, as the cliché goes? No, he answered, it can actually cleanse. But more importantly, “when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals.”
If we transport and apply his quote to the carnage we have witnessed in the last two months concerning the scandalous behaviour in the SNC-Lavalin affair, there is so much to see. Where to start?
There is, most prominently, a prime minister whose expression of power has revealed his disdain in attending to the rule of law and the independence of his attorney general and prosecutorial service. For him, the exercise of power confers supreme value on the pursuit of political successes ahead of principled ones. He professes to do politics differently, but the distinctions have become negligible.
There are – or at least, there were – his top bureaucrat and political aide. Their powers, hardly less substantial or consequential than the prime minister’s, revealed similar traits in bending rules to suit their objectives in the service of a partisan mission to appease a special interest. Theirs is a revealed power of progress through transactions.
And there is – or at least, there was – an iconic cabinet minister in the centre of the episode, likely there in the first instance as a political newcomer to demonstrate a more than symbolic commitment to the important undertaking of Indigenous reconciliation, but devalued personally along with that commitment when she would not surrender to the vortex of the prime minister’s power revealed. In her, the revelation of power did not need to produce a cleansing but served to reveal a continuum of wisdom and groundedness.
Jody Wilson-Raybould tasted the flavour of Justin Trudeau’s power and spat it out. But rather than act like the patient teacher of his former career in front of the classroom, his power in the effective principal’s office revealed a petulant impatience with the student minister. When she questioned the quality of the lesson she was being served, she was first seated in the corner, then expelled from the school.
There also is – and, too, was – another revered cabinet minister who dared echo the concern of a breached boundary. She was summarily dispatched, too, because the revelation of power in Trudeau seemingly countenances no public questions or exhibits of dissent on even one issue among hundreds that must be abided.
So this is where we are today: a brand bloodied, a prime minister who has degraded in two months what took him years to fabricate, and the casualties of arguably four of his most important colleagues. He may believe he has torn the Band-Aid off a wound that will heal in time, but he has neglected the symptoms of internal bleeding in the body politic. And to stretch the analogy, he is bound to be wounded again and again in the time ahead for his pique in power.
Most considerably, the man who professes empathy and compassion on his front stage has been revealed to be cold and above a public apology. He appears to be reveling in his big reveal. His blind objectives appear to be walking him toward the appeasement of SNC-Lavalin with a deferred prosecution agreement for its frolic in securing Libyan business; if not, he needs to take that matter off the table, because rest assured the dust will not settle otherwise.
In booting Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the caucus, and pretending it was the caucus that did so instead of him, Trudeau has set a new and disturbing parliamentary standard for acceptable political discourse in a party – so yes, he is doing politics differently. If Theresa May were applying this standard, though, the Brexit-torn British Conservatives would be able to hold their caucus meetings in a prison cell.
Do not for a moment believe that Wilson-Raybould’s recording of the conversation with Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick was any sort of ethical tripwire. The tripwire was the content of the conversation because it laid bare the nature of the power the Trudeau administration wishes to privately wield and could not let us publicly understand.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
