Many years ago, at the height of the Watergate scandal, I was sitting around with a bunch of other graduate students at Dalhousie University sharing semi-informed views and imperfect legal and political understandings, as graduate students are wont to do. The topic arose: could this (the Watergate mess, including the then-imminent and well-deserved removal of Nixon) happen up here in our sunny Dominion?
There was as usual (and you'll still hear lots of this today) pompous assertions of how much better we Canadians are than Americans, how much less prone to unscrupulous political behaviour our system surely is.
Alas, among our group was a political scientist who was studying Canadian institutions and actually knew a few things about comparative institutions. He made some very sobering remarks to the effect that if our leader, the prime minister, ever got his hands that dirty, he'd be able to bury the issue. Our more knowledgeable friend pointed out that while the president is top-dog in executive terms, the U.S Congress, unlike our parliament, is largely independent of his will.
Congress's work (as Mr. Trump is now experiencing) is not at the president's bidding. This, one of the strongest countervails to Nixon and his shenanigans, was the Senate watergate Committee. While its majority were Democrats, the Republicans on the Watergate Committee did not try to stifle the investigations. Ranking Republican member Sen. Howard Baker sternly demanded an answer to the question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
Can you imagine Liberal MP Anthony Housefather asking something like that about Justin Trudeau's actions? In the end, the Senate Committee fully carried out its mandate to get to the bottom of the scandal and Nixon's goose was cooked.
Forty-six years later Canadian parliamentary investigations of the SNC-Lavalin affair and the alleged inappropriate pressure on the Solicitor General to meddle in the prosecution of the engineering giant have been shut down, with minimal explanation as to why, by the Liberal majority Justice Committee.
A major difference is that all of those shameful toadies sit completely at the beck and call of the man whose alleged misdeeds were being looked into. None of those members have much profile or political strength, beyond their own ridings and, conceivably, could be elbowed out even at the re-nomination stage by a vindictive Prime Minister.
The recent statements and resignation of Celina Caesar-Cevannes, after encountering Trudeau's unsunny nastiness, just confirms what kind of a person Jody Wilson-Raybould was up against when she didn't capitulate to his will. The point is that a petty even not very bright but certainly self-preserving leader here in Canada has been able to rather easily thwart full parliamentary investigation of his alleged wrongs.
Norman Dale
Prince George
