LeBlanc’s Irving Idiocy

On LeBlanc’s Staggering Stupidity

In the (just short of a) year I worked for a New Brunswick MP, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of meetings in his Ottawa office with shareholders, interest groups, and various lobbying efforts. Dairy farmers, some anti-MAID group (it was 2016, after all), and something to do with firefighters or emergency services personnel or something (I remember the food at the reception that night more than the fine details). It’s a whole junket - groups would swing by the Hill, set a shitton of meetings, host a reception, and then hope that they bought some goodwill. If you work on the Hill and want a free dinner during a sitting week, you can find one most nights. But there’s one meeting we did significantly more prep for than any other.

Shockingly, when representatives of the Irving family came up to Ottawa, the stakes rose. Instead of having the meeting on Wayne’s couches in his office, it was in a conference room somewhere else in the precinct. There was a pomp and circumstance to it, in a way there never was for anyone else. Most meetings were a quick briefing 5 minutes before they were scheduled to arrive - the Irving meeting was the priority of the week. I’m not begrudging that - Wayne has won two more terms when he arguably shouldn’t have given the political environments, and my staffer boss is now New Brunswick’s Housing Minister. Clearly they’re good at electoral politics.

But, with the Globe reporting that Dominic LeBlanc spent a night at the house of one of the Irvings, it’s worth noting the cozy relationship between the Liberals and Canada’s elite. And it’s worth noting for a reason - the Liberals must break this laissez faire attitude to ethics and to perceived corruption if they are to end their current malaise.

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Strip out all of the names in the SNC or WE scandals for a second, and just acknowledge what actually happened, that everyone agrees happened. In the SNC case, the PM asked the Attorney General repeatedly to overrule the Director of Public Prosecutions to help a Quebec company for explicitly electoral reasons. In the WE case, the PM wanted to sole source a nearly billion dollar contract to a charity run by people who he called his friends, who paid his mother over $300k, and who paid for his Finance Minister to travel to Africa on a voluntourism trip worth 40k. None of this is okay if you strip away the personalities.

In the same way, Dom LeBlanc doesn’t just have an obligation to avoid improper behaviour, but the appearance of it. Is LeBlanc steering contracts to the Irvings? Probably not. But it doesn’t matter. This coziness is unacceptable because it’s a sign of intellectual decay.

Friend of the site and hopeful 2025 Scrimshaw Show guest Eric Lombardi has banged this drum more effectively than I can on policy grounds, but this is also a political problem. The Liberals have a reputation before being in the pocket of favoured industries and of picking and choosing winners and losers. A government viewed as out of touch allowing a Minister to stay at the house of an Irving doesn’t exactly scream in touch with the politics of this. And this matters, because if we genuinely believe Pierre Poilievre is wrong then it is our obligation to stop fucking up the easy shit.

The Liberals are bleeding young voters in part because of a sense young voters have that the deck is stacked against them and in favour of other people - variously the old, the rich, and the powerful, depending on who you talk to. Attending the Irvings’ shindig for the rich and powerful and crashing at the host venue is a great way of confirming everyone’s worst fears.

The problem with the Trudeau era Liberals is the same as always, which is that there’s a good but not perfect legislative agenda ruined and destroyed by the idiocy of their elitism. LeBlanc didn’t even think twice about this decision, I’m sure, because the idea that a New Brunswick elected official wouldn’t suck their dicks is so unheard of as to be a shock. But it is a horrible decision that explains so much about what Justin Trudeau and his people think about the public and the outside world.

The problem is, we are in the world of electoral politics. We are not China’s basic dictatorship. You do not get the presumption of innocence. It is not the public’s obligation to give you the benefit of the doubt merely because you want them to. It is not the public’s job to defend the indefensible. And that’s where we are.

We have many crises in this country, and we have a then-Public Safety Minister who can’t even figure out that getting a cab to a hotel after getting shitfaced on the Irvings’ dime would be smart. It’s not confidence inspiring for a simple reason - we face a crisis, and we’re being led from the back. A Prime Minister too scared to face his people, a government bleeding talent, and a Finance Minister with a demonstrable lack of judgement.

Does any of this matter? In a sense, no. The Liberals will lose, Dom will be left out of the Cabinet (or shadow cabinet) and quietly told to retire to spare him the indignity by the next leader, and all will be forgotten. But the fact that smart people don’t see how cancerous LeBlanc’s Irving infatuation is to democracy, and to our country, is a problem. And if we refuse to acknowledge it as such, we will let our party die the death that it keeps threatening.

As one of the 7 people in this country actually committed to keeping the Liberal Party alive and solvent, I’m done with this shit. It’s pathetic, it’s unacceptable, it’s crap on a policy level and a noose around our necks politically. It’s time somebody inside the Liberal Party demands more. Given the paucity of others doing it, I guess it’s my job.