Trudeau’s Extremely Partisan Testimony

On The PM’s Incendiary Comments

Let’s start this piece with a few things that I don’t think will be that controversial. Pierre Poilievre should get a security clearance, and it’s shameful that he doesn’t. Any traitor to this country needs to be tried and convicted for their crimes. And if CSIS and/or the RCMP are unable to make a case, it’s unreasonable to leave people under shadows of suspicion indefinitely, as former Liberal MPP and Cabinet Minister Michael Chan has been for 14 years now.

It’s also probably worth having a much broader conversation about why police investigations take so fucking long in this country, including various foreign interference related ones and others. Jason Kenney had won a provincial election and stepped down as Premier before his ratfucking investigation from his 2017 UCP leadership race was complete. That’s completely unacceptable, whatever your view on his guilt or innocence. If it is that the RCMP are institutionally useless as well as institutionally racist and prone to covering up anything that makes them look bad, then it’s another reason it needs to be dismantled brick by brick.

These should all be non-partisan, noncontroversial ideas. I sincerely hope they are, because there’s a lot of moving parts and this is a complicated situation, and I really hope we can agree on these things at least. Because I know I’m not going to be overwhelmingly popular when I say the Prime Minister fucked up today.

The argument, as I’ve written and many others have as well, is that naming the Parliamentarians who have accusations of being, essentially, compromised by foreign governments would jeopardize ongoing investigations. It’s a solid argument that fits with the positions I took when Han Dong was being accused, which is that politicians deciding who is guilty and what is and isn’t credible is a bad idea. But the problem is, if you’re going to say that there are compromised Conservatives, then the calculus changes.

Now, the PM did, under cross-examination, acknowledge that he also has knowledge of Liberals and members of others parties under accusation of compromise, but he led with the fact that he knows of Conservatives to make a political point about Pierre Poilievre’s refusal to get a security clearance. And at its core I think that’s disgraceful. At this point, the PM’s decision to air this publicly has made the position that we don’t publicly name the names untenable, and has jeopardized these investigations. And I think that’s shameful.

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I’ll listen to a lot of arguments that I’m wrong, but not about the fact that this was a partisan attack. I don’t disbelieve the Prime Minister, but it is undeniable a man who had a MP publicly call for his resignation, is polling 20 points down, and has a 23% favourable attacking his political opponent and overwhelmingly likely next Prime Minister with classified information in a way that puts a cloud over the whole Conservative Party is a political attack. It is one, and the way we know this is that if Pierre Poilievre or Stephen Harper used an official inquiry to refer to vague accusations against some Liberals we’d lose our fucking shits.

We also know it’s one because Dick Fadden agrees. The PM “lapsed into, really, extreme partisanship”, according to the former CSIS Director on Power And Politics last night (watch the whole interview, it’s genuinely very good on a lot of technically thorny and complicated questions). This fact is self-evident, and remains so the day after it happened. But it’s a political attack, and that fact is undeniable.

It can be a justified political attack, I guess, but that’s where I can’t get. If you’re going to refer to the classified information, then you have to be willing to back it up. “Take it on faith” - even when the PM is under oath - is not good enough as a political answer to a political attack. The decision not to proactively disclose that the PM knows the names of potentially compromised Parliamentarians on both sides of the aisle was a mistake because whether through error or malice he thought it was more important to communicate his attack on Poilievre than to serve his duty to the country and be honest that both parties have unclean hands.

His decision to make a political attack also calls into question the fragile implicit agreement that naming the names is a mistake. I maintain it is one, but I think at this point it’s an unavoidable one. You now have the whole House under a cloud of suspicion, and a tiny proportion of them actually potentially guilty. The cloud is now on every one, whether guilty or not.

It’s also not great at all from the standpoint of anti-racism efforts, an issue the PM cares about. Spoiler alert, the MPs who are most likely to get vitriol and abuse because of the PM’s testimony are not gonna be the white ones. It is going to be hell for non-white MPs being accused of being traitors even more than they already are because the MP just threw the cloud over every. single. one, all in a vain effort to take down Poilievre.

Naming the names is still a bad idea in a vacuum, but we aren’t in a vacuum anymore. The PM has just elevated the list of MPs from people with some form of allegation against them to there being people “engaged in” foreign interference with “clear intelligence”. That's a very specific statement that has been levied towards at least one CPC Parliamentarian. The PM needs to back that up. I don’t care that he’s under oath, because the point is not that he is lying. I take him at his word that there is at least one Parliamentarian or candidate in the CPC who has “clear intelligence” they are or were “engaged in” foreign interference. I don’t accept that every CPC Parliamentarian should now have this cloud of suspicion over them because of whatever small number of people have accusations against them.

There is no solution to this problem that doesn’t accept that at some point the Canadian public cannot be allowed to unwittingly vote for a candidate who is under suspicion. There could be an election any time. Do the NDP, the Bloc, the Liberals, and I guess the Greens (though, with only two MPs and 50% of them passing a security clearance, my guess is they’re clean) deserve the benefit of the doubt to handle these matters properly? Poilievre’s Conservatives obviously don’t, given he won’t get a clearance and read the list, but do the rest of them?

The resolution the Liberals want to this crisis - and it is a crisis - is for the country to take it on faith that CSIS and the RCMP have it under control, and that every MP at the next election is clean because the party has done their jobs. It will end, in their eyes, with every subsequent retirement being scrutinized for whether they’re retiring out of genuine desire to not run again or because they’re being banned from running again because of foreign interference. And it will end with everyone having to take it on faith that the parties have done their jobs properly. That’s not acceptable.

It’s never really been acceptable, but it’s especially unacceptable now that the Prime Minister has used compromised Conservatives to score votes. The fact that the Liberal government is polling terribly shouldn’t matter, but it does. Because that’s where we are right now. It’s not where we want to be, but it’s where we are.

Justin Trudeau used a national inquiry to launch a partisan attack on Pierre Poilievre. It was shameful. Poilievre’s refusal to do the right thing for his country and get a security clearance does not justify or excuse Trudeau’s decision to make an appearance as PM in front of an important inquiry partisan. Poilievre’s refusal to obey any standard is not a reason to not hold Trudeau to one. It’s just not.