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It’s an opinion the Trudeau government came to power vowing to eradicate

John Dean, the famed Watergate figure, wrote last week that he first met the real Richard Nixon when he informed the president — who he served as White House counsel — that there was a cancer on his presidency. He wanted the president to end the coverup that threatened to destroy him: to stop the lies, the deceit, the attacks on opponents. Nixon, of course, rejected his advice, and we know the rest of the story.

It’s fair to say Jody Wilson-Raybould met the real Justin Trudeau when she told him she’d done her due diligence on the SNC-Lavalin matter and concluded it was just and proper to let the prosecution proceed. She refused to intercede on the decision by the director of public prosecutions, or to engage in a hunt for wiggle room that would save the company from prosecution on corruption charges despite the prime minister’s clear indication that he very much wanted her to do so.

It’s always a bad sign when a government’s last line of defence is that it never explicitly broke the law, no matter how much it may have danced around it

That’s when the real Trudeau showed himself. It wasn’t the Trudeau who’d embraced her the day she was sworn in as minister of justice and attorney general, as she cupped his head in her hands and they gazed emotionally into one another’s eyes. That had been a special moment, one built for the cameras. It had obviously meant a great deal to her, and likely to him as well, though perhaps not for the same reasons.

For Trudeau it was a perfect reflection of the imagery he wished to convey to the Canadian people. It represented the shift in branding from the previous, hard-edged Conservative administration to his new, enlightened, “progressive” replacement, the one that had run so hard on the pledges of gender respect and Indigenous reconciliation. For Trudeau, to be so clearly admired by a woman as accomplished as Wilson-Raybould — former Crown prosecutor, First Nations chief, and now holder of the office that gave Trudeau’s father his political start — couldn’t be better.