By now, some enterprising pundit should have landed a contract to produce a book on the ongoing SNC-Lavalin affair, the Canadian politics version of Breaking Bad.

Somewhere, so melodramatic has it all been, a rock opera might even be in the works, the soundtrack opening, perhaps, with “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” switching as things take a darker turn to the anguished thunderings of Meat Loaf, a few suitably ominous bars for the appearance of the Clerk of the Privy Council (he who does not wear a wire), and something Wagnerian for the crescendo.

If nothing that flamboyant, the government’s performance will surely turn out to be a case study in business schools and political science circles about how not to handle a crisis.

There are a few iron laws that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government have transgressed, lessons that might have been taken from study of former PM Brian Mulroney and the former NDP government of Bob Rae in Ontario.

Mulroney could have told Trudeau two things.

The first would have been to “dance with the one that brung ya.” Which is to say he should never have forgotten the touchstones of women’s place in politics, Indigenous reconciliation and transparency in government that were central to his victory in the first place.

The second would have been to stay in touch with cabinet and caucus members through phone calls, notes and such, the better to not be caught unawares by grievances grown into crises.

It’s astonishing that a PM so trumpeted for emotional intelligence has demonstrated so little of it throughout this ongoing tragicomedy.

There are other axioms that first ministers should never fail to heed.

One is that the most unforgiving metric in politics is the gap between promise and performance.

As Rae learned the hard way in Ontario, when you’re on record as promising the easy utopia of a new and improved politics your performance will be guaranteed to fall short.

When that happens, as it surely will, those who will make a leader pay most dearly for his or her failings will not be the opposition, but the true believers.

In the 1990s in Ontario, it was New Democrats such as Mel Swart and Peter Kormos who did Rae more damage than outsiders.

Just as for Trudeau, it has been cabinet ministers who assumed the sunny ways of electoral reform, of reconciliation, of openness and an end to the top-downism of the Harper years meant something tangible.

Once things blow up, shrewd crisis managers say, the goal is to imagine where the problem is going and get out ahead of it – the way Johnson & Johnson famously did after the Tylenol contamination in 1982.

Instead, the Trudeau Liberals have responded to their challenge pretty much the way Facebook did when it became apparent that foreign bad actors had used the platform to interfere in the 2016 American election.

Facebook first denied the existence of the malfeasance, then denied any responsibility for it.

In his new book Zucked, former Facebook adviser Roger McNamee writes that: “They could have said: ‘Now we get it!’ We screwed up! We will do everything possible to fix the problems and restore trust’.”

Like Facebook, the Trudeau Liberals came late to every acknowledgment and – save for the stellar performance before Parliament’s justice committee by the prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerry Butts – have rung thin and dissonant at virtually every turn.

In this, they ignored another iron law: that all politics, all story, is emotion-based.

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It’s a fair bet that most Canadians are still unclear on the details of SNC-Lavalin. But they are engaged. And they are clear on their feelings of disappointment, betrayal, anger.

Yet when the PM finally did speak on the issue, he failed to match tone to task, tried instead, to resolve emotional matters with circumlocutions about process.

It was a recipe for failure, and the old drama teacher should surely have known it. He failed to make his abstractions tangible.

As Lisa Cron wrote in her book Wired for Story, “Make us feel and, believe me, we’ll know who’s right and who’s probably not. Tell us what to feel, on the other hand, and what we’ll feel is bullied.”

Which is, in some ways, the heart of the PM’s failing.

He was elected in 2015 precisely on “feelings” — of optimism, of hope for a better way and fairer and more progressive day, of cynicism fatigue, of a recognition that the marginalized needed to be heard.

His unexpected coming to power reflected the optimism of a nation made to feel that better was always possible.

And now, the scandal that threatens his government will endure a bit longer as a result of the Liberal justice committee’s decision – the PM’s assurances about lessons learned notwithstanding – not to ask former minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to return for a second round of testimony.

It will give federal Liberals no comfort to recall that the first book about the Bob Rae government was written by two New Democrats.

It was called “Giving Away a Miracle: Lost Dreams, Broken Promises and the Ontario NDP.”

There are few new stories in politics. Merely new players.

Correction — March 18, 2019: This editorial was edited from a previous version that misspelled Jody Wilson-Raybould’s name.

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