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So Wednesday’s raw power play by the committee’s Liberal majority, voting to adjourn, minutes into a special meeting, rather than take up an opposition motion to recall Wilson-Raybould forthwith, had a clear strategic rationale.

Sure, it looks bad, on the day: if this is a government that has nothing to hide, it seems strangely determined to hide it. But for now the government can claim it is not obstructing her testimony, just delaying it. The decision on whether to recall Wilson-Raybould, or any of the other officials she has named as having been part of the pressure campaign, has been left to a closed-door meeting of the committee set for next Tuesday.

Tuesday, Tuesday… what else is happening on Tuesday? Ah yes, the budget. Either way, then, whether she is allowed to testify or not, it will be drowned in the flood of news coverage that inevitably follows any federal budget, let alone the last before an election.

And with every week that passes, the government is betting, the greater the chance of the public getting bored, the media getting distracted, and the opposition getting nervous. I would not necessarily bet that they are wrong.

There is more than one way to stonewall, after all. It doesn’t have to involve firing special prosecutors or shuttering committee hearings. It can be done more subtly: first by dissembling, sowing confusion by means of a series of blurred distinctions, irrelevant objections and non-denial denials until a more-or-less coherent cover story can be agreed upon; then by more deliberate stalling tactics, giving the media as few news hooks as possible and creating enough diversions that the public’s attention eventually wanes and wanders. In Watergate, it was called a “modified, limited hangout.”