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Justin Trudeau has the look of the high school hero who’s just fallen off his snowboard in front of all the twirling cheerleaders.

It’s been a hard week for Mr. Trudeau. It must have been even harder for the Gender Analytics Team down in the boiler room of the Department of Public Works (it’s next to the Deliverology stables, just past the Memorial to Proportional Representation). They’ve had to parse Jody Wilson-Raybould’s fierce testimony and sequence it with the government’s equity-feminism.

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No one has sung hymns to strong, independent women more fervently than Mr. Trudeau. It doesn’t wear well that the strongest and most independent woman in his entire cabinet no long feels she can, with honour, sit in that same cabinet room with him.

The strongest and most independent woman in his entire cabinet no long feels she can, with honour, sit in that same cabinet room with him

There’ll be no more roundtables with Tina Brown and Gloria Steinem. Ivanka Trump will cross the street when she sees him coming.

It doesn’t wear well that a strong, independent woman, determined to secure the mast of the rule of law, is put under siege for months by a train of flacks and aides, principal secretaries and chiefs of staff — supplemented by the Black Knight of the Clerk of the Privy Council — to work a deal, to finesse, to go around that rule of law because “… there’s an election in Quebec … (and) I’m the member for Papineau.” It doesn’t wear well that a strong, independent woman was subject to threats, veiled and not-so-veiled, effectively harried and harassed because she refused to politically oblige the big boys in the PMO. The Feminist-in-Chief took a massive hit.