Messy divorces do not disqualify people from high office.

It is 2017 — and we’ve come a long way from the days when people stayed in bad marriages for the sake of their political reputations. But when disintegrating marriages get tangled up in the courts, it’s harder to draw the line between the public and private lives of high office holders.

Add a charge of assault, and the fact that this particular dispute involved Canada’s next governor general, and what you have is a major transparency conundrum — not just for the appointee but for journalism as well, and for the Prime Minister’s Office maybe most of all.

That conundrum was fuel for a lot of conversations on Tuesday after iPolitics reported that Julie Payette, due to become Canada’s 29th governor general later this year, was charged with second-degree assault in Maryland in 2011, while she was still living with her now ex-husband, retired RCAF pilot William “Billie” Flynn.

The charge, which Payette called “unfounded” in a statement to iPolitics, was subsequently dropped within weeks of her being charged; she has since had the record expunged. The marriage breakup led to a prolonged legal battle of six years’ duration, which ended only days before the announcement of Payette’s imminent move to Rideau Hall.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office has said only that it has “no comment” on the whole business and would not elaborate on whether this part of Payette’s past was discovered during her background check — which you’d expect to be pretty rigorous for someone getting the job of the Queen’s representative in Canada.

For what it’s worth, the fact that the court dispute was settled in late June tells me that PMO did know — and asked the GG appointee to tie up all legal loose ends before the announcement was made. So why couldn’t the PMO tell iPolitics about this? No answers have been forthcoming.

It’s not unusual for prime ministers to force their GG appointees to get their private lives in order, as those with long memories might recall.

Jean Chrétien obviously pressured his two GG picks to get married before they moved into Rideau Hall in the 1990s. Roméo LeBlanc, divorced in 1992, wed his then-partner Diane Fowler just weeks before his 1995 swearing-in. Adrienne Clarkson, who had been living unmarried with John Ralston Saul for many years, also ran to the altar days before her appointment in 1999. Clarkson also settled a long-running legal dispute with a neighbour in the days before she was sworn into office.

Those appointments were made not all that long ago, and yet Chrétien was seen at the time as relatively progressive for making them. He wasn’t against divorced people taking up residence in Rideau Hall (as most previous PMs undoubtedly would been) but he didn’t want them living in sin there, either.

The current prime minister would hardly be likely to take a moral stance against divorce either, given that his father Pierre loosened up the laws on divorce in the 1960s — and then, with his own breakup with Margaret, helped dispel some of the political stigma surrounding it.

Could the PMO simply say ‘no comment’ in response to reports about an assault charge involving a male appointee? Probably not. Could the PMO simply say ‘no comment’ in response to reports about an assault charge involving a male appointee? Probably not.

If any prime minister could be expected to understand how private lives can get all too messily public, it would be Justin Trudeau. (For details, read the searing stuff about Trudeau’s childhood in the first few chapters of his 2014 biography, Common Ground.)

A friend of mine (a Conservative) suggested to me in an email that if Trudeau’s PMO did know about this part of Payette’s past — and, as iPolitics reporter B.J. Siekerski noted, it turned up pretty easily with a brief search — then this was a potential opportunity squandered. What if Payette had been publicly candid about how her marriage breakup had landed in the courts?

“A large number of Canadians — mostly, but not all, women — wouldn’t mind seeing someone in the gilded halls who is a bit more like them,” my friend suggested. “It’s hard to relate to an astronaut, electrical engineer, computer whiz and accomplished singer. But a mother and wife in a tough spot, who got out of it and got on with a successful life, (that’s) something to be proud of.”

I can’t have been the only person wondering on Tuesday whether a male appointee to the GG’s office would have cleared the background check with an assault charge — even a dropped one — turning up in his not-so-distant personal history.

I should state that I’m not a big fan of the “what if it was a man” counterfactual discussions about feminism and issues like this; they’re often based on a shaky, false equivalence. But in this case, it brings up a thought-provoking question about the appointment and the way the news was handled. Could the PMO simply say “no comment” in response to reports about an assault charge involving a male appointee?

Probably not. Let’s all cast our minds back to Trudeau’s delivery of swift justice against two former Liberal MPs accused of pressing unwelcome advances against two female New Democrat MPs. There was little in the way of a presumption of innocence granted then, as I recall.

Journalists, like everybody else, are going to be divided on whether this was a story. In my informal, casual inquiries on Tuesday, some agreed with readers who said it was a “cheap shot” against a woman supremely qualified to be GG.

A lot of reporters (me included) get annoyed when police charges are quickly equated with guilty verdicts (that happened a lot in the case of Mike Duffy and other Senate controversies of a few years ago). The fast-moving world of news on social media only worsens this phenomenon: Presumption of innocence is even harder to maintain when charges are revealed — even six-year-old ones that were dismissed and expunged. That was another aspect of the criticism of the Payette story I heard in some quarters on Tuesday.

I don’t work in the iPolitics newsroom, so I wasn’t part of the discussions around how and when this story got published. So when I decided to write about the controversy, I asked James Baxter, the publisher at iPolitics, to explain how this became a headline in Tuesday’s news roster.

“We think this is a story because it was such a random check and we turned up an arrest,” Baxter said. “From there, as we began to look, we saw the elements of a concerted effort to sanitize the record. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But the GG is not just any position. People call it ceremonial, but it carries a lot of weight.”

In my experience, most political journalists aren’t crazy about doing stories on the private lives of public people, especially when we all know that no one can really understand someone else’s relationships. Ignoring this aspect of Payette’s background, however, doesn’t seem all that journalistic either, especially if the media now knows something that the Prime Minister’s Office did not know, or didn’t disclose.

Here’s one thing that journalists (or even fans of movies about the media) also know: saying “no comment” never really makes a story go away.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.