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It was just one more perfectly predictable, almost perfectly staged, extended selfie in the life of official Ottawa.

Budget day in the nation’s capital, the cable news networks filled with spinners spinning, many if not most of them photogenic partisans and “strategic communications” specialists doing the bidding of the parties for which they or their firms toil or hope to toil; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not responsively answering a single question in that oxymoronically named exercise called question period and opposition members unable to do a thing about it but watch their hair burst into flames; Finance Minister Bill Morneau actually saying, this in response to a question from Lisa LaFlamme of CTV about what in the budget will make Canadians turn the page from the SNC-Lavalin scandal, “Optimism to face the future.”

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What does that even mean?

Have any of these clowns, from all parties, who talk endlessly about what “Canadians want” with such staggering confidence, ever met a real Canadian, that is, one who is not a Liberal/Conservative/New Democrat shill from birth, who works at Costco or GM or some other real, non-trust-fund-enabled job, who plays hockey and drives her kids from pillar to post and wants a government that takes care of the basics and MPs who just occasionally speak the truth or say what they actually mean, not heave up some dreadful porridge of “talking points” determined by teams of handlers?

Earlier Tuesday, the Liberal-dominated Commons justice committee did what its Liberal members had telegraphed they would do the night before the meeting in a letter — shut down its purported “review” of the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio.

If not a surprise, this was covered with such a shine of stupendous duplicity it was dazzling.

The Liberal members, in their letter, cited the fact that they had heard 13 whole hours of testimony from 10 witnesses and thus had “achieved our objectives.”

They actually said they had “approached our work with an open mind,” forgetting, perhaps, that Anthony Housefather, the Liberal chair, had within a week of the Jody Wilson-Raybould story first breaking, and before anyone had testified, suggested, twice, that perhaps she’d been shuffled out of justice because her French wasn’t good enough.

He later apologized, but it’s not as if he hadn’t got his oar in to discredit the woman. It’s not as if he or his colleagues on the committee are independent.