I was so confident that the House of Commons Ethics Committee would vote down a Conservative motion to invite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to explain his vacation with the Aga Khan before committee members, I wrote this column before the meeting had even started.

Am I psychic? No — but I can count. The Liberals have a majority of the seats on the Committee. That’s all you needed to know to predict the fate of this motion. Generally speaking, it’s all you need to know to predict everything a Commons committee does.

Canadian parliamentary committees are a joke — a sophisticated puppet show, with people as puppets. With a majority government in power, they serve absolutely no legislative function and are micromanaged by the party whip and leader’s offices.

They produce little drama — unlike Congressional committee hearings. Think of former FBI director James Comey testifying about his private conversations with President Donald Trump over Russian interference in the 2016 election. Try to imagine something analogous happening here. I suspect the average Canadian is blissfully unaware that Parliamentary committees even exist, or could tell you what they do.

Commons committees don’t have a legislative function and they don’t work to “hold government to account.” Their purpose is partisan, political. So it was with Peter Kent’s doomed attempt to drag the PM before the committee to answer difficult questions about his breach of the Conflict of Interest Act.

I know Peter Kent, I know he can count to six — and I know he wasn’t looking for any result other than the one he got.

So why did he bother? Because for up to two hours on a January afternoon, with little else going on in Ottawa (Trudeau’s on a national town hall tour), Kent and his colleagues — with every outward appearance of genuine indignation — got to rant and rave for the cameras about how offended their constituents are by the prime minister’s dalliances with the rich and privileged.

After the committee meeting adjourned and the cameras were turned off, the Conservatives comms team started cranking out furious media releases and fundraising appeals. The messaging they use will be generic; honestly, they could start recycling this stuff to save time. After the committee meeting adjourned and the cameras were turned off, the Conservatives comms team started cranking out furious media releases and fundraising appeals. The messaging they use will be generic; honestly, they could start recycling this stuff to save time.

They’ll get to go on delivering blood-and-thunder speeches and releases about how this is the first time in history that a sitting PM has breached the ethics law, and how he must be brought before the committee to answer for his sins.

Across the aisle, the Liberals will go on delivering equally bad (and contrived) theatre — reminding the committee (and, more importantly, the voters watching at home) that Trudeau is really, really sorry and has vowed to work with the new ethics commissioner to ensure that he doesn’t cross that line again. They’ll insist that the prime minister, his cabinet and good Liberals everywhere take their ethical obligations very seriously.

But really, the Liberal members on the committee had only one job — to vote against the motion. The fact that the committee is chaired by a Conservative largely explains why this matter was on the agenda while Parliament is in recess.

After the committee meeting adjourned and the cameras were turned off, MPs from all parties doubtless dropped their pugilist personas and asked each other how their Christmas holidays went. Then a couple of them doubtless retired to the nearest watering hole while the Conservatives comms team started cranking out furious media releases and fundraising appeals about a feckless prime minister who refuses to be held to account. The messaging they use will be generic; honestly, they could start recycling this stuff to save time.

The Liberals certainly didn’t invent this form of wagon-circling. I well remember one dark day in the history of Parliament — in March 2014, when the entire House was entertaining a motion to refer the case of CPC MP Brad Butt to committee to decide if he should be declared in contempt of Parliament.

Butt admitted to having been “mistaken” when he emphatically told the House that he had personally seen people pulling discarded voter ID cards out of a dumpster and then using them to vote. The Speaker at the time — Andrew Scheer — found a prima facie case that Butt misled Parliament. On a whipped vote, the Conservative majority defeated the motion.

Matters of ethics should never be determined by a partisan majority. I am not saying that either motion should have succeeded. I am saying that such motions should be decided on the basis of something better than partisan politics, which is seldom open to persuasion.

In Ottawa, that never happens — except in those rare cases when a member becomes so politically toxic that the party must cull the herd to save itself. But that, too, is an entirely partisan calculation.

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