Anne Kingston: Enlisting the longtime Liberal party loyalist as a 'change-maker' offers yet another example of a government losing its optics mojo
This week’s appointment of former Liberal cabinet minister Anne McLellan as a “special advisor” to the Prime Minister continues the government’s bumbling campaign to wrest control of the SNC-Lavalin narrative so they can bury it six-feet under.
That said, reviewing a system in place since Confederation is not a bad idea. Wilson-Raybould herself recommended that the justice committee look into bifurcating the attorney general and justice minister roles. But it’s off topic. Dividing the roles also wouldn’t preclude any government that didn’t respect the rule of law from pressuring an attorney general.
McLellan’s arrival also signals willingness to take advice from the Liberal old guard, the very scandal-prone establishment the Trudeau government defined itself against in terms of bringing new transparency, accountability, and a decentralized PMO. But McLellan, deputy PM during the Liberals’ “sponsorship scandal,” was also front and centre after the Liberals’ federal defeat in 2006 when the party needed regeneration.
Drug-policy expert Michael DeVillaer, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster University, took issue with McLellan heading the task force in a 2017 paper, “Cannabis Law Reform in Canada: Pretense & Perils, which raised concerns about the integrity of the process: “… the broader entanglement of interests among Canada’s current ruling party, at least one major cannabis producer, and a prestigious law firm connected to both, and of the cannabis producer’s...
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