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Does Justin Trudeau have a problem with women?

That’s one of what I see as three possible explanations for the bombshell announcement Monday from Jane Philpott, the ethical pushback from Jody Wilson-Raybould over SNC-Lavalin and the recent decision of the formidable Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes not to run in the next election.

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Either the PM has a woman problem, or women are simply the bravest and most principled members of his caucus, or the way politics is practised specifically under Trudeau et al. and/or generally in the modern Canada leaves some of the women who ran for him profoundly disillusioned and sad.

It’s hard to know, too, which is the worst of these sorry choices.

Philpott, just recently named as the Treasury Board president in the same shuffle that saw Wilson-Raybould moved from Justice to Veterans Affairs, is quitting cabinet precisely because of the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, the incursion she saw upon the “independence and integrity of our justice system” and because she said she has “lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised.”