Transnational leading practices

It is hard to make sense of the local news given the degrees of corruption, incompetence, innumeracy, illogic and rank partisanship on display. It is even harder to sort the international reports.

Is Canada about to experience a constitutional crisis? Wasn't on my radar screen till the past few days.

First I saw Ezra Levant's twitter thread.

1. For my American and British friends: Canada's Justin Trudeau is done. He might try to fight on; I personally think he's too damaged. He's irreparably damaged. Here's what happened in a few short tweets. pic.twitter.com/E57BxWPKhK

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) February 28, 2019

Click to view the thread.

Is Trudeau really done?

I know Levant from a few years ago when he was dueling with pettifogging multicultural regional boards in Canada who sought to circumscribe his free speech and opinions by curtailing what he was allowed to say. I recall one instance where he showed up at some regional multicultural board facing charges of, perhaps, insulting Islam.

He was facing a mid-level regional bureaucrat, of the Dolores Umbridge type, who assumes because she has the power, she has the right. She was entirely unprepared for her encounter with Levant. She was ready to convict him and inflict monetary and other punishments on him for his refusal to tug the forelock to statist speech restrictions. Instead, he showed up with his own camera crew, recording the session and arguing principle and freedom, not the particulars of Ordinance Code 367, Section III, Paragraph 9, subsection L.

It was first class entertainment though you couldn't help but feel a tinge of sympathy for the cognitively outclassed bureaucrat - until you considered that all totalitarian regimes depend on low level toadies to officiously implement their evil.

While Levant is arguing the case of Age of Enlightenment, Civil Rights, and Freedom and has been doing so for a long time, he is also frequently careless and inclined to over-claiming. So I see his tweet and perhaps it represents reality or perhaps it represents a version of reality.

I check the New York Times for the left of center statist version. From Trudeau’s Ex-Attorney General: ‘Veiled Threats’ Were Made to Drop Case by Ian Austen.

Breaking weeks of silence, the former cabinet minister now at the center of a growing political crisis in Canada testified that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, members of his staff and senior officials used “political interference” and “veiled threats” in a campaign to get her to drop a criminal case against a major corporation.

In testimony to a House of Commons committee examining the prime minister’s actions, Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister and attorney general, recalled asking Mr. Trudeau: “Are you politically interfering with my role, my decision as the A.G.? I would strongly advise against it.”

As she described 10 meetings, 10 conversations and a series of emails about the criminal case with senior government officials, Ms. Wilson-Raybould said that during one particularly fractious session she had “thoughts of the Saturday Night Massacre,” a reference to President Richard Nixon’s orders to Elliot Richardson, his attorney general, to fire Archibold Cox, an independent prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

So yes, Levant seems right on the substance of the accusation.

Austen cautions:

But with no smoking gun in her testimony — Ms. Wilson-Raybould acknowledged during questioning that no one in the government ever instructed her to order prosecutors to reach a settlement — the damage to Mr. Trudeau may ultimately be contained. In the short term, however, the testimony has put his government firmly into damage control mode.

Austen seems to be saying that there is some substance to the charge but then pooh-poohs its implications.

However, he finishes his report with:

Prof. Richard Johnston, a political scientist who studies election polling at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said that before the testimony, it had appeared that Mr. Trudeau’s government might weather the storm created by Ms. Wilson-Raybould.

“Now it’s a huge crisis, the situation has just gotten dramatically worse,” Mr. Johnston said, adding that the prime minister will find it difficult to “explain away” Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s exceptionally detailed chronology that, she said in her testimony, was based on extensive notes as well as her recollections of each of the meetings.

“She’s kind of got him dead to rights,” Professor Johnston said. “It doesn’t look good.”

Uh-oh.

Just as I have to discount Levant because of his full-throated, but perhaps overstated, defense of the Enlightenment, rationalism, human rights and particularly free speech, I also have to discount the NYT's reporting. They have a long history of swooning for handsome politicians of the left, with nice hair and casual attitudes towards the rule of law and freedom. John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Beto O'Rourke - they always fall for the movie-star looks and statist views. It is not improbable that they might be glossing over the constitutional threat.

I don't know. It probably is somewhere in the middle but I am not in position to arrive at the probable truth.

But I must admit, since everyone appears to agree that Trudeau did attempt to bring at least persuasion to bear on the AG to drop an investigation which was politically inconvenient, I am astonished that the Canadian politicians were not paying attention to leading US practice. If you want to get the AG to drop an inconvenient investigation, you don't leave an email trail and a phone-log trail.

No. You have an unscheduled meeting in a private jet on a remote runway under the guise of talking about the grandkids. It worked here.