Article content continued

So yes, the prime minister’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, has resigned, and yes, caucus is probaby upset, and yes, Justin Trudeau will likely suffer a hit in the polls, and yes, the resignations of two of his most important ministers have shaken his government. But come on. It should not have to come to ministerial resignations to prevent the prime minister from abusing his power. Where was cabinet before this?

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

For that matter, where was caucus? Has anyone in caucus, with the honourable exceptions of Saint John-Rothesay MP Wayne Long, Beaches-East York MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Whitby MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, departed in any significant way from the government line on this matter? Has the Liberal majority on the Justice committee invited any witnesses that had not been previously approved by the prime minister’s office?

So the glass may is 10 per cent full, perhaps. The former attorney general was indeed able, while she remained in office, to prevent the prime minister and his flunkies from trampling all over the independence of the prosecutor. The precedent was averted of a wealthy corporation with a history of bribery and corruption escaping prosecution by lobbying everything that moves and threatening to shift its headquarters out of a politically sensitive province.

But there has been precious little in the way of accountability for any of this. If the system were really working as it should, basic constitutional norms like prosecutorial independence would not hang on one woman’s defiance. If the system really worked, the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada would not have had to listen to lectures from unelected political staffers and supposedly non-partisan civil servants on the need to submit the rule of law to the higher demands of Liberal election strategy.

If the system worked, it would not be the prime minister, having been credibly accused of something perilously close to obstruction of justice, pondering whether his accuser should maintain her position in caucus. It would be the caucus deciding whether he can keep his.