Dispatch From the Front Line: David Johnston, what were you thinking?
Also: feed the troops, too. And pity Ukraine, stabbed in the front by the GOP and in the back by Biden.
Hello, friends. Lots to talk about this week. Let’s get to it as soon as we can.
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We don’t feel any particular need to recap this week's activity at the Foreign Interference Commission at any length. Line editor Gurney had a column covering an important element of that on Friday, which we suspect most of you have read by now. As an overall point, we would note that we expect some interesting testimony to come over the next few days as government officials continue to testify, leading up to the prime minister's planned appearance this week. We will obviously be watching that, and we expect the prime minister to perform well. As much as his critics hate to admit it, the man tends to overperform expectations in settings like that. His testimony at the Public Order Emergency Commission is a good example. Many expected some kind of bombshell. None detonated. He held his own.
So as we wait to see that, it does occur to us that perhaps one of the more useful things we could do in our weekly dispatches is simply keep readers appraised of what we know now that we did not before the proceedings began. And as Gurney recapped in his column, it’s worth remembering all that came before this. First there were the initial denials by the government that there was anything to see here, and that it was basically racist to talk about it. That was followed by Liberal efforts to derail committee inquiries via filibusters and outright avoidance, eventually leading to the Johnston report.
And the Johnston Report is something we will be thinking about, and rereading, ahead of the coming testimony. The Line approached David Johnston‘s selection as special rapporteur and his work to produce his report with maximum good faith. We went into the Johnston Report with a completely open mind. We never found the Johnston Report to be a whitewash; as we noted then, even a charitable reading of it was still a damning indictment of this government. We stand by that. But what we cannot do is ignore the fact that Johnston's decision to recommend against a public inquiry, on grounds that too much would need to remain classified for it to be a useful exercise, has not aged well. Bluntly, Johnston was wrong, and in a significant and serious way.
What we have already learned from the commission has made it worth it, and it's hard to come up with a charitable explanation for Johnston's choice to not recommend one.
Consider some of what we learned just this week: