Surprising things don’t tend to happen outside cabinet meetings on Parliament Hill.

So the appearance of Jody Wilson-Raybould at cabinet on Tuesday — a mere week after she quit her job as veterans’ affairs minister — was stunning not just for how it happened, but for where it happened.

The next surprise happened at the Commons justice committee — in the form of an exhortation from Liberals for Wilson-Raybould to come before the MPs and air whatever grievances led to the implosion inside Justin Trudeau’s government.

Suddenly it’s a little harder to make this whole saga into a story about a strong-arming Liberal government and a victimized former minister, tantalizing as that tale may be. Liberals themselves, outside the Prime Minister’s Office, seem keen to get to the bottom of the mess that has now cost Justin Trudeau one minister and one principal secretary.

Apart from everything else, though, all this activity at cabinet and committee on Tuesday raises another intriguing prospect: has this crisis for Trudeau’s government jolted it into fulfilling the promise to loosen the iron grip of the power in the Prime Minister’s Office? Is Monday’s resignation of Gerald Butts, the principal secretary, an occasion to finally follow through on that old Trudeau promise to dilute the power of the PMO?

Trudeau no doubt has many regrets about how life in government has unfolded, especially lately. But one wonders whether it’s occurred to him that much of what has happened in recent days and weeks would have rolled out very differently — or maybe not at all — if he had actually loosened the power of the PMO, as he once vowed.

“One of the things that we’ve seen throughout the past decades in government is the trend toward more control from the Prime Minister’s Office," Trudeau said in an interview with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge during the 2015 election campaign. “Actually, it can be traced as far back as my father, who kicked it off in the first place … I actually quite like the symmetry of me being the one who ends that.”

In the beginning of Trudeau’s mandate, it looked like he might be handing some power back to ministers. The media was once again given notice of when and where cabinet meetings were taking place — a practice stopped during Stephen Harper’s years. Cabinet ministers actually returned calls from reporters and lobbyists in the capital soon learned that they had to make their pitches to individual ministers and their departments, instead of just focusing all their efforts on the PMO, as they had in the Harper years.

Then came the talking points and the terse replies, and rewards for the ministers and staffers who exhibited the most obedient message discipline. Ministers in this Trudeau government don’t hire their own staff, as a rule — they are appointed and shuffled around from time to time by the PMO. This is not a decentralization of power by any stretch.

Much of the controversy around Wilson-Raybould’s dramatic exit from cabinet revolves around what pressure was (or was not) being applied to her to approve a plea deal for SNC-Lavalin on fraud and corruption charges.

The pressure is alleged to have come from the PMO — and we should stress “alleged” here, since we only have anonymous reports of such, and on-the-record denials from Trudeau and Butts.

But it is undisputedly true that SNC-Lavalin didn’t lobby Wilson-Raybould, according to the lobby registry — it focused a lot of attention on the PMO. As CBC reported in its timeline of the SNC-Lavalin lobbying efforts: “The company’s initial lobbying efforts were focused entirely on the PMO and top economic ministries, even though the lobbyist registry says the meetings were to discuss justice and law enforcement.”

Clearly no one sent the memo to SNC-Lavalin that Ottawa no longer works on the “who you know in the PMO” principle. That’s because it still has — and the people one had to know were Butts and chief of staff Katie Telford.

Butts’s departure, as some people were telling me on Tuesday, will be a test of whether the centre can hold in this government, even if Telford remains as a formidable force within the PMO.

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The more correct question to ask, though, is: should the centre keep holding? The shock and awe that followed the announcement of Butts’s departure from cabinet was confirmation that this PMO is as dominant in this government as it was in Harper’s time — if not more so, and certainly more than was the case during Trudeau’s father’s time. The very fact that people were finding it hard to imagine a world without the hand of the PMO in everything, as personified in Butts, tells us that Trudeau never did get around to undoing what his dad started.

It may be too late in this mandate for a culture change in the Trudeau government, but seeing Liberals seizing some power to take back this story at cabinet and committee on Tuesday may tell us that some of the reins are being loosened, at least temporarily.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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