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Isn’t it mingy that now, now, they’re going to pay Vice-Admiral Norman’s legal bills?

Worse still, the trial conceivably could be running as counterpoint during the election, sparing the Tories and the NDP the cost and labour of producing their own election ads. Clips from the trial and the headlines of every day would have done that work for them.

There will be no roses (once a totem flower in Liberal lapels) sent to Marie Henein, but there should be. She has, in a least a limited sense, saved them from themselves. And saving them from themselves, though not to be advocated as a permanent strategy, appears to be the operating principle at Liberal HQ for the last few months. Or if a nautical reference is needed it’s been all battleships in the bathtub on the communications front.

Incidentally, isn’t it mingy that now, now, they’re going to pay Vice-Admiral Norman’s legal bills. They instigated the hell he’s endured for two years, denied a three-and-a-half-decade career officer financial support while facing a battery of publicly funded government lawyers, and then and only when the case against him falls apart — then, they offer to pay his legal bills.

The best time to help a drowning man is while he’s still in the water, or as it was put by the great Dr. Johnson on the subject of patrons and writers: “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?” The government is very much a “patron” in this tale, Norman is ashore now, and they are “encumbering” with late help. The real help came from friends and fellow military who stood by him when it counted, most exceptionally former army commander Andrew Leslie, who being a Liberal MP made a choice between caucus solidarity and loyalty to a comrade. Lt. Gen. (Rt.) Leslie landed very firmly on the right side of that potential dilemma. Also it is a testament to some Canadians’ sense of fair play that witnessing the imbalance of forces between the government and “private citizen” Norman, gave so obligingly to his GoFundMe account.