Surprising things don’t tend to happen outside cabinet meetings on Parliament Hill. So the appearance of Jody Wilson-Raybould at cabinet on Tuesday — a mere week after she quit her job as veterans’ affairs minister — was stunning not just for how it happened, but for where it happened. The next surprise happened at the Commons justice committee — in the form of an exhortation from Liberals for Wilson-Raybould to come before the MPs and air whatever grievances led to the implosion inside Justin Trudeau’s government. Suddenly it’s a little harder to make this whole saga into a story about a strong-arming Liberal government and a victimized former minister, tantalizing as that tale may be. Liberals themselves, outside the Prime Minister’s Office, seem keen to get to the bottom of the mess that has now cost Justin Trudeau one minister and one principal secretary. Apart from everything else, though, all this activity at cabinet and committee on Tuesday raises another intriguing prospect: has this crisis for Trudeau’s government jolted it into fulfilling the promise to loosen the iron grip of the power in the Prime Minister’s Office? Is Monday’s resignation of Gerald Butts, the principal secretary, an occasion to finally follow through on that old Trudeau promise to dilute the power of the PMO? Trudeau no doubt has many regrets about how life in government has unfolded, especially lately. But one wonders whether it’s occurred to him that much of what has happened in recent days and weeks would have rolled out very differently — or maybe not at all — if he had actually loosened the power of the PMO, as he once vowed. “One of the things that we’ve seen throughout the past decades in government is the trend toward more control from the Prime Minister’s Office,` Trudeau said in an interview with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge during the 2015 election campaign. “Actual ...
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