Anne Kingston: When pressed to be personally accountable, the PM has a tendency to transform things into a 'teaching' moment. It did not work today.
Justin Trudeau dropped by the National Press Gallery on Thursday morning to issue a non-apology apology before planning to fly to Iqaluit where he’d express regret for government mistreatment of Inuit during TB epidemics between the 1940s and ’60s. Canada’s prime minister is a champion of issuing fulsome apologies when they are formal and historical and don’t involve his own behaviour.
Trudeau did remind the AG that he was an MP from Quebec at a Sept. 17 meeting, he said. He did confirm she told him she had made a final decision; he asked her to “revisit” it, he said, and she said she would. She didn’t get back to him so he assumed her decision was no longer final. Trudeau has a tendency, when pressed to be personally accountable, to transform it into a theatrical “teaching” moment.
Wisely, Trudeau did not recycle the “women experience interactions in professional contexts and other contexts differently than men” line on Thursday. But he came close: “Situations were experienced differently and I regret that.” Exactly what he regrets was not clear. He did speak of “next steps” involving “external expert opinions” on such things “as the dual role of the minister of justice and the attorney general.” If the presser was intended to quell the controversy, it failed.
Instead of showing humility or contrition over a now-seismic situation, Trudeau lectured: “I believe real leadership is about listening, learning and compassion,” he said. Yet Trudeau’s compassion, his vaunted EQ, has been MIA. That was evident hours after Wilson-Raybould’s devastating and credible testimony to the Justice Committee. Trudeau spoke to reporters in Montreal, where he was about to celebrate a Liberal by-election victory.
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