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A second reporter asked for Morneau. Responded Trudeau — bewilderingly, obnoxiously: “You have to ask the question of me first, because you get the chance to talk to the prime minister.”

Morneau did eventually get to defend himself on the question of his assets: he said he told the ethics commissioner everything and followed her advice. It’s not a great defence. Mary Dawson’s not a great ethics commissioner. But it’s exactly the one Trudeau offered on Morneau’s behalf before ceding him the podium. Why not just let the guy talk? Farmers and doctors and Italian restaurant owners might not much like Morneau these days, but he’s less likely to jam his foot in his mouth than Trudeau.

What was that all about? Search me. It struck me as a great example of something I’ve observed before about Trudeau and some of his senior ministers: sometimes they just do and say really weird things. It’s like they’ve been trapped their whole lives inside a self-affirming bubble that the rest of us have never even visited. And they tend to do the weird stuff with an adamantine self-assuredness that just halfway through their first mandate seems terribly misplaced.

They still bugger up bog-standard communications operations. On Monday morning, hours after certain media outlets magically had details of the day’s announcement and mere minutes before Trudeau was to speak, Finance was still struggling to get reporters the details under embargo. But this isn’t (just) about media whinging. It speaks to this government’s overall competence, to the quality of its read on the Canadian populace.