POLITICKING: The loneliness of Jody-Wilson Raybould must be profound. She sat at the witness table at Justice Committee in Parliament Wednesday alone, with only her opening statement and a glass of water on the table. No staff. No briefing books or tablets, an MP among her MP colleagues.
Then, in meticulous detail, she showed Canadians how The Town works, official Ottawa, the nation’s capital, and the relentless pressure exerted on her to ignore her constitutional duty as Attorney-General and bow to demands to interfere in the SNG-Lavelin case involving bribery and corruption.
Canadians didn’t like what they learned about how our political system works.
Reality check; Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is the MP for Papineau. He cannot be Prime Minister of Canada unless he and his Quebec Liberal MPS are re-elected in the fall election. Politics matter. His mistake was thinking his Attorney-General –the nation’s top law officer—could resolve his political problem.
Ms Wilson-Raybould’s options are limited. She was elected as the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville and plans to remain one. But it is not clear whether her colleagues will allow her to remain in the Liberal caucus, since Prime Minister Trudeau stupidly renounced her testimony. If she stays, she will be shunned by his loyal MPS, who, like lemmings, may follow him into the depths of defeat in the October election.
She could cross the floor and join an opposition party, as former Progressive Conservative MP Scott Brison did when he joined the Liberals and served as President of Treasury Board. But floor crossers tend to lose credibility with the voters who elected them. And she is unlikely to be comfortable with the policies of either the Conservatives or the NDP.
Or she could run as an independent MP, electing to sit in the farthest reaches of the newly relocated House of Commons, losing party status and thus access to research budgets, extra staff, positions on parliamentary committees.
It is not clear how her voters would react. Her riding is a new one, carved out of the former turf of several Vancouver ridings with a polygot of different neighbourhoods and ethnic groups and without and established constituency infrastructure.
But whatever she chooses, Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould must be re-elected. “This is who I am,” she told Canadians during the televised committee hearings. “This is who I will continue to be”.
Many Canadians like who she is, her honesty, courage and integrity. And they want her to represent them in Canada’s Parliament, because she is who they would like to be too.