Article content continued

Wilson-Raybould, according to the anonymous explainers, also suggested Joyal jump right to the top and become chief justice, too.

But, the whispers claim, Trudeau had once read a speech Joyal had given at a legal conference and was disturbed Joyal thought judges sometimes used the Charter too much to overrule the will of Parliament and legislatures. In Trudeau’s mind, this made Joyal too “conservative.”

Photo by Kevin King / Postmedia Network

This new explanation, however, is illogical on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to start.

The best evidence this is rubbish is the fact that we are now nearly two months into Lavscam and this is the first anyone has heard of this. The Liberals have been flailing around in a cesspool of their own making since early February. They have tried half-a-dozen lifelines to pull themselves out of the swirling current and only now are advancing, “Um, no really, it was Glenn Joyal. That’s why the PM pushed Wilson-Raybould out.”

Up until this past weekend, no one, not Trudeau or his former principal secretary Gerald Butts or “retired” Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick or Wilson-Raybould herself, has so much as hinted that this controversy was caused by something other than SNC.

No one’s explanation, not even the Liberals’ anonymous leakers’, has ever been that the rift with Wilson-Raybould was about anything but the sweetheart deal for SNC-Lavalin. Rather, at least up until now, the storyline has been that their efforts to convince her to carve out a remediation agreement for the Montreal engineering and construction firm wasn’t “inappropriate pressure.”