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On Wednesday, hours after the federal ethics commissioner found the prime minister guilty of having molested the Conflict of Interest Act again, the PM’s office published an advisory report that he had commissioned from the Hon. Anne McLellan. Trudeau had recruited McLellan to look into a structural issue underlying his recent SNC-Lavalin troubles: namely, that the Canadian government has always given the distinct jobs of justice minister and attorney general to just one person.

To recapitulate the crash course we’ve all received lately: the “attorney general” role is an ancient one that includes handling prosecutions on behalf of the state. The attorney general traditionally has a direct relationship to the Crown. In that role she does not answer to a prime minister or a cabinet, and her exercise of independent judgment on prosecutions is a bulwark of the rule of law.

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The minister of justice, by contrast, is just a minister. In performing minister-of-justice duties she is expected to act in unison with a cabinet, obey a prime minister, and behave as an ordinary partisan politician. And in Canada, if a prime minister doesn’t like what his attorney general is doing, and he fails to win her over after a long series of hints and warnings about his mood and reminders that Quebec has a whole lotta Commons seats, he can go ahead and dump his justice minister.