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Did you hear the one about Justin Trudeau’s policy dude threatening a reporter in the men’s room?

Chances are you didn’t, unless you made it to the millionth word of last weekend’s Globe and Mail puff piece on Trudeau and his photographer. The piece (takeaway: image is everything) closed with Michael McNair, Trudeau’s policy chief, taking offence to the reporter chucking a single, solitary question his boss’s way at the end of the day.

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The offending probe? “What’s it like to be the most photographed person in the country?” Woodward and Bernstein it wasn’t, but that didn’t stop the prime minister’s man from wielding his shiv in the gents, where he told the Globe and Mail to consider its “relationship” with the Prime Minister’s Office before using Trudeau’s answer.

Where to begin? First, it’s not policy’s job to threaten reporters, it’s the press team’s. Second, you don’t threaten them for lobbing a softball. You knock it out of the park (which Trudeau did). Third, why did the paper bury the lede? If image is everything, and you have a substance guy threatening you for asking about substance(ish), surely that’s substantive? Fourth, why hasn’t the entire Parliamentary Press Gallery gone crazy about PMO media thuggery?