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At the end of the day nobody was being asked to do anything illegal, Boisvert noted, and not all political staff would share the sensibilities of constitutional lawyers. The decision whether or not to pursue a remediation agreement for SNC-Lavalin was a political choice. “In any case it was not corruption, it was the suggestion to apply a solution provided for in the law,” he wrote.

In the same newspaper Paul Journet said Butts had added new shades of grey to the overall portrait being painted, picking up on the question of whether Wilson-Raybould was too inflexible and made her decision too quickly. “The overall picture is becoming more precise,” he wrote. “It’s one of a minister who decides very quickly on complex files, without consultation. And one of a government at best clumsy, at worst unable to understand when no means no. Unfortunately for those who want an agreement for SNC, even if Wilson-Raybould was wrong, she had the right to be.”

My God, he's got to be in hot water for him to bring up his dad Richard Martineau, Journal de Montreal

The picture that’s emerging is “one of an attorney general closed off to all proposals that could help enrich her evaluation of a file,” opined Josée Legault in the Journal de Montreal. She was either convinced that a criminal prosecution was in the public interest or she was opposed to the very idea of deferred prosecutions, Legault said, and why did she decide to stay in caucus if she was so upset? The fog, she wrote, keeps hovering above the “supposed scandal.”

Pundits haven’t failed to acknowledge the prime minister’s fall from grace, however. A Journal column titled “Trudeau: And God became man” begins with the supposition that if everybody keeps telling you you can walk on water, you’ll probably start to believe it. Richard Martineau put it this way: “He thought he was indestructible, now he realizes he’s only a human being like the others. Goodbye Superman, hello Clark Kent.”