Couldn’t Trudeau have selected a rapporteur about whose independence no disagreement was possible among people of goodwill?
from the Liberal government at the end of his term as governor general, whereupon he accepted a job leading the federal Leaders’ Debates Commission. This was itself a questionable move for a superannuated governor general, who leaves office with a brain-spraining pension so that he doesn’t have to queue up for more government work, but since Johnston’s critics are all personally assured of his trustworthiness, I don’t suppose one can quarrel with it.
But I hope I won’t be thought to be challenging the bona fides of St. Stephen Harper in pointing out all these things that make his excellency unfit to serve in the current context as an independent special whatever. Harper asked the Queen to make Johnston governor general at a time when Johnston’s intimate friend Justin Trudeau was an opposition MP, and not even a very highly regarded one.
The Liberals in the Prime Minister’s Office, it seems, never anticipated for a second that the name of David Johnston would provoke controversy or doubt. Ibbitson’s scrambled-egg reasoning about the appointment suggests they might have thought of it as a brilliant piece of political jiujutsu.
Ibbitson wasn’t discouraged by such thoughts. Faced with the mass defection of his trade from his original position, he returned toacreage on Monday to admit that Johnston’s suitability was “an issue on which people of goodwill can simply disagree.” He then used this disagreement as, basically, a peg for a reheated column about how the civility of the past has disappeared from politics, sigh, moan, whimper.
It is no doubt very big of Ibbitson to admit that others have experienced the Johnston appointment differently. But that second column raises another revealing question: couldn’t Trudeau have selected a “rapporteur” about whose independence no disagreement was possible among people of goodwill? Isn’t this in fact the most essential qualification for this invented job?
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