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So what’s 1968 got to do with it? That’s when this country had another Liberal prime minister named Trudeau.

SunMedia

And for two and a half months during that turbulent year — coinciding with the Prague Spring and the famous May ’68 protests in France, as well as a federal election and FLQ terrorist strikes in Canada — the nation’s prime minister was also its minister of justice and attorney general.

Divided loyalties? Not when one man — Pierre Elliott Trudeau, future father of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, The Constitution Act of 1982 and of our current prime minister — held all the power of those three positions simultaneously. If Justin Trudeau (albeit a non-lawyer) had possessed the same three titles last fall, when attorney general Wilson-Raybould rebuffed her boss and declined to seek a deferred prosecution agreement for SNC Lavalin, it’s safe to say the prime minister wouldn’t be in the political mess he’s in today.

But there might have been other messes.

When Pierre Trudeau took on the minister of justice and attorney general roles as prime minister, that hadn’t happened since the 19th century — and it has never happened since. Sir John A. Macdonald occupied all three positions — PM, MoJ and AG — from 1868 to 1873, after he’d co-authored the federal act (with his brother-in-law Hewitt Bernard, the deputy attorney general) that created the federal Department of Justice. The arrangement suited Macdonald, who believed that legal considerations in the early days of Confederation needed to be balanced — or even trumped — by political imperatives.