What would the admirable Jane Philpott do?

I guess we have the answer. She would quit cabinet. She would remain an MP, fail to resign from the Liberal caucus, continue to attack the government in an election year as a matter of “principle,” and say in explicit terms that her fellow Liberal MPs care more about re-election than conscience.

Equally, she would give an interview — although she could use parliamentary privilege to speak candidly — to hint at corruption in the SNC-Lavalin affair so complex that it might take four hours to explain. Four hours!

So she told Paul Wells, a great political journalist with a preternatural ability to persuade intelligent politicians to say the silliest things. Perhaps he uses silence judiciously.

And with that — in a climate emergency, with young people bereft, with Donald Trump still in office — we’re pulled back into SNC-Lavalin. It’s what historian Simon Schama might call “cumulative column acceleration.”

What is Philpott referring to? My wildest fantasy: Ottawa was distributing crystal methamphetamine in diplomatic pouches until two cooks — yes, the cabinet cooks meth on those rural caucus retreats — plucky Jody Wilson-Raybould and Philpott, went on strike for a bigger lab. Or their own distribution deal.

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Or perhaps she and Wilson-Raybould were unhappy at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s gender-equal cabinet and quit to make an obscure feminist point that frankly eludes me and many other feminists.

Or she is, as she says, totally devoted to the honest burghers of Markham-Stouffville.

Here’s my problem with these theories. People in her riding are the same as other Canadian voters. They want a stable future for their children, an effort at preventing and preparing for the climate change that is about to devastate us, good jobs, equity for women, fairness for Indigenous people, and a national pharmacare plan.

And that’s why two women, presumably feminists, quit cabinet, so they could personally do less to achieve these things. I grieve to use “feminist” because I firmly believe that women are a lot like men. They are individuals and don’t represent the cause.

As it turns out, that’s a good thing.

Talking to Wells, Philpott spoke obsessively about Wilson-Raybould, blue-skying about what a cabinet minister “under pressure and perhaps being harassed” might do. In a world run by men, I usually advise such women to do a Tina Fey: go over, under and through. Live to fight another day. I have a basket of clichés at the ready.

Women, including cabinet ministers, have to be resilient. I have worked for and with difficult people but I am resilient. Of course, that is only because I had very large class sizes in high school, says Doug Ford.

Perhaps Wilson-Raybould and Philpott were tutored. Either way, I cannot fathom their motive for doing everything in their power to elect a Conservative government headed by the embarrassment that is Andrew Scheer.

MPs are well-paid and well-pensioned, as they should be. And it’s hard to leave the public eye. I doubt they want the leadership of any party, national or provincial, not that it will ever be on offer. Voters don’t mind political manoeuvring. That’s the job. But they don’t like serial knifings, which is what Philpott is doing to the prime minister and Liberal colleagues.

It bothers me that Philpott was unkind enough to say of them, “there are people who are afraid that they’re not going to get elected because of what I did.” She doesn’t mention the possibility that they fear the return of the Conservatives with their sexism, Yellow Vest pals, racism against Indigenous people and at the border, apathy about climate change, and laxity about gun control including assault weapons.

Maybe political life was more than a job to many Liberal MPs. It was a call to make Canada a better place. It is possible.

Both Wilson-Raybould and Philpott are good people, and I admire Philpott’s immense stores of compassion. But they’re naïve and new to politics, which is all about bending with the blows rather than breaking, and taking the long view. It is not pleasant to think yourself demoted, as Wilson-Raybould did with Indigenous Services and Veterans Affairs. It hurts.

But I don’t understand Philpott’s motives for her continued knifings. Is she stalking her own party? If the two are waiting to be exiled and claim supreme victimhood, I say it discredits feminism, because pathetic men do this all the time.

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Look at former Ontario Conservative leader Patrick Brown writing Takedown: The Political Assassination of Patrick Brown — it’s J’accuse written by a hamster — and driving around looking for a random election. Look at U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wailing.

“This is not my fault. I did not start this,” Philpott told Wells. This is a self-help affirmation that I do not intend to post for morning guidance.

It doesn’t matter who started it. And I find that people who say it is not their fault are often the very people whose fault it is.

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