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When the Liberals brought down the federal budget earlier this week, I was genuinely curious as to whether it would allow the prime minister and his party to move past the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has now dogged them for … uhh, let me count … the last 42 days (as I write this). A budget is a big deal. This is an election year budget, too, so it was obviously going to be more, ahem, voter-friendly than most. There would be a lot to talk about … if Canadians were ready to move on.

I think a lot of us would like to — I definitely would. Forty-two days is a long time in any news cycle, and there are some other interesting stories out there to watch and talk about. But there are two problems here, especially if you’re the prime minister: the Liberal response to the entire affair has been almost unfathomably bad, counterproductive at every turn … and new stuff keeps coming out all the time.

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Let’s first tackle the latest ineffective Liberal actions, then we can move onto the exciting new stuff. Earlier in the week, the Liberal majority on the justice committee shut down their investigation into the entire matter, which means that Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former attorney-general and justice minister, will not be called to testify again. The majority said they felt Canadians had heard enough (Anthony Housefather, a Liberal MP and chair of the committee, has offered his thoughts on the matter in the National Post). Shutting down the committee’s work unavoidably raises the spectre of a coverup. Nor was the decision by the prime minister to appoint former Liberal MP, cabinet minister and deputy PM Anne McLellan as a special adviser particularly reassuring. It’s not just that McLellan’s mandate is forward looking, rather than investigative — she’s a quintessential partisan Liberal insider. She even had to back out of a fundraiser for the party she was committed to when she took the special adviser job.