Never say I have not done my best. After spending the week trying to whip myself into a white lather over the SNC-Lavalin controversy or even rouse some latent enthusiasm, I still conclude that it is not a scandal, or even an affair.

It is an office cubicle feud, the quietly seething-but-still-polite kind that entrances Ottawa but not the rest of us. Do young people even notice this story? No, they have bigger problems.

Check your privilege, Canada. It’s the kind of upmarket quarrel we are fortunate enough to have but it needs to end before it does real damage.

Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould made a strange glancing remark in her public statement. She said she had told Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick that she “was having thoughts of the Saturday Night Massacre” after feeling pressured to change her opinion on deferring the SNC-Lavalin prosecution.

She was referring to U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal — yes, a real one — firing his attorney general and then his deputy in search of someone (who he finally found) to fire the special prosecutor.

It was startling because Donald Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, had just finished publicly testifying that Trump is a racist, a con man, and a cheat who might resort to violence and whose departure from office in 2020 might spark a second civil war.

We have to hand the Americans another win. Their scandals are solid beef and blood.

It’s not just that the U.S. is bigger and richer than we are, it’s that Americans are a violent, hair-trigger people, extreme in every aspect of life and a global public danger. The historian Simon Schama described a “despicable indecency by Trump born from his pathetic toadying to an inhuman despot,” and that was just Trump’s insult to the Warmbier family, whose son was murdered in North Korea. What will Trump do tonight, or tomorrow morning?

I was happy to see Wilson-Raybould speak so candidly without having to worry that she wouldn’t make it home safely. Maybe Cohen won’t be assassinated before next week’s planned testimony. It’s possible.

But then Wernick has also said he fears that someone will be shot in this year’s federal election. And he’s right. Canadians are being urged to hate.

Meanwhile, back to SNC-Lavalin, that pale cup of tea in the frigid mid-winter.

“There is no magic money tree,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told a nurse living on starvation wages in 2017.

She’s wrong. There is a magic money tree in a capitalist democracy, and it’s called personal/corporate taxation in a G8-level functioning economy. Canadians want so many things — health care, education, climate change preparations, Alberta pipelines, ethical exports — but sometimes miss the crucial element, which is jobs.

Every government in the world compromises to save companies, jobs and livelihoods. Say what you like about Conservatives, and I have, but they would have shut this down long ago. Imagine them prosecuting over some alleged Libyan bribes in the early 2000s.

That’s why Prime Minister Trudeau keeps harping about “growing the middle class” and infrastructure, just as Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives would do if they were in power. It is hypocrisy to criticize the PMO for giving grave consideration to a huge, decade-long blow to a storied Quebec company like SNC-Lavalin, but that’s too obvious a point to dwell on.

Turn your eyes to a bigger story, which is Canada toadying to the U.S. in the Huawei case. Why did we do that?

Wilson-Raybould is an honourable MP whose intelligence and ethical standards are a credit to Canada. She’s in my feminist pantheon, as are cabinet ministers Chrystia Freeland, Amarjeet Sohi, and Jane Philpott, and — yes, it sounds odd — former Conservative cabinet minister Gordon O’Connor, who in 2012 defended abortion rights in the House of Commons as a human need.

But layoffs don’t terrify her in the way they do me, or my readers in Oshawa or Edmonton. If you have watched a mill town wither during a protracted strike against an American corporate monolith, as I have, it marks you. It’s visceral.

When she hears “layoffs” or worse, “pensions,” an icy drop of water doesn’t slide down her spine. The room doesn’t get chilly and the taps run with blood, as they do for other Liberal MPs heading into an election.

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She took a more rigid legal view of what constitutes the public good than the government can afford to. I wish she hadn’t resigned from cabinet — it was a slur on Veterans Affairs, which is a crucial job — but she did.

It is a good idea to split the jobs of attorney-general (Crown) and justice minister (cabinet), as she suggested. It’s also a good idea for the Liberals to win re-election, as we need Trudeau to stand strong as the U.S. lashes out at us while descending further into frenzy.

I honour both her and the PM for agreeing to disagree — just as we opinionators will have our (endlessly droning) say — but let’s drop the matter.

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