Because Jody Wilson-Raybould and the corpse of the Double-Hyphen Affair is getting a fresh attempt at necromancy now that her book is being released, we’re going to see a renewed round of questions about what happened. The Conservatives are sending out a bunch of press releases intimating that RCMP is still considering investigating the matter, and Wilson-Raybould herself is calling on the prime minister to allow them to investigate obstruction of justice – because they really want this zombie to wake up and start trying to eat the brain of this campaign.

In response to questions yesterday, Justin Trudeau said he has not been contacted by the RCMP regarding SNC-Lavalin, which…is not actually surprising. I’m not sure what there would be to investigate, really, and why it would be Trudeau they would be investigating. Her own testimony seemed to indicate that the pressure was largely coming from the jackasses who were in Bill Morneau’s office at the time (and it was those same jackasses in Morneau’s office who were letting SNC-Lavalin pull their puppet strings in pushing through the deferred prosecution agreement legislation into the budget implementation bill), and if you actually listen to the whole call with Michael Wernick and not the carefully curated clips that Wilson-Raybould set up in how she steered the conversation, he was looking for information that she had previously sent to PCO, but didn’t reach his desk. There is no actual obstruction of justice happening. The ultimate irony in all of this, however, is that if they had gone ahead and given SNC the deferred prosecution agreement – which it sounds like they wouldn’t have qualified for anyway – the company would have actually faced some consequences. As it was, SNC-Lavalin settled while the case around an executive collapsed and the company got away with a lesser penalty and few, if any, compliance measures, without any interference on anyone’s end.

The worst part of this, however, is that you have columnists who are writing things like “Wilson-Raybould offers a ballot question in an election about nothing,” which is ludicrous. This is not an election about nothing – no election is about nothing. There is plenty at stake in this campaign, but because it’s less so for straight white guys, whom these columnists are, they are blind to it.

On the campaign trail:

• Justin Trudeau was in La Prairie, Quebec, to talk about his party’s Quebec priorities.
• Erin O’Toole was in Vancouver to talk about EI leave for parents who suffer pregnancy loss (but the plan lacks in detail).
• Jagmeet Singh was back in Sudbury to claim that he would tax big corporations and the wealthy (but his plans for doing so are dubious at best).
• Vandalism against Liberal candidates’ signs stepped up and bow one incumbent’s car was spray-painted on Saturday night.
• The Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy rated the NDP’s platform costing, and gave it a 10/18, with a failure in transparency.
• The CBC tries to compare the different parties’ environmental platforms.
• Althia Raj hears from Jagmeet Singh as he tries to argue that Trudeau is terrible and Erin O’Toole is worse (and she does call some of his bullshit).
• Supriya Dwivedi disputes the pundit class’ assertion that this is an election about nothing, and lays out the stark differences between the Liberals and Conservatives.
• Heather Scoffield makes the case for childcare being the key to our economic recovery.

#elxn44 https://t.co/rtuBgvPQA3

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) September 12, 2021

Good reads:

• Here’s a profile of an Afghan-Canadian entrepreneur who is helping out with the refugees arriving from that country.

Odds and ends:

My latest Loonie Politics Quick Take recaps week four of the campaign.

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