'Gerry! Gerry! Gerry!': Notes on a Tru-Anon meltdown

From filibusters, to freak-outs, to family friends turned 'special rapporteurs,' the Liberals are signalling to the public this is no ordinary scandal.

Programming note: Yours truly will be in Ottawa this week, attending the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference. If you happen to find yourself in the town that fun forgot, come say hi!

Kaveh Shahrooz کاوه شهروز @kshahrooz

Is there anyone more obnoxious on Canadian political Twitter?

Perhaps we should be more forgiving of Zellers-brand Steve Bannon, and his worst-of-MAGA moment.

Now a fixture in the neo-liberal geopolitical consultancy racket — at least until his college drinking buddy comes calling again — Butts has been forced to sit back and watch (read: tweet incessantly and insultingly) as another section of his Wikipedia page gathers footnotes.

With his ‘green legacy’ in Ontario ending in shambles, not a day passing where a commenter doesn’t remind him of his $126,000 in taxpayer moving costs, and the forever stain of his efforts to lean on Canada’s first Indigenous Attorney General on behalf of a deferred prosecution agreement for their Laurentian business partners, an asterisk in the form of “election integrity: now in question” appears to be the cherry on the top of the sundae for Trudeau’s ever-disgraced former no. 2.

To go for the jugular of legacy media, on the one occasion per year where the Big Red Machine is held to account, will always give away the game of partisan hacks who spend their days prattling on about the importance of policing ‘misinformation’ and protecting the press, just so long as they remember who’s boss.

There are no red lines for these people. They know the game by now. One doesn’t have to apologize. Just stack the deck in your favour, and when you start to feel a little tension on the line, accuse your ideological opponents of that of which you yourself are guilty.

Butts had a front-row seat to the decades-long expansion of Mandarin-bloc influence inside the halls of power. He knew this would become an issue (to his credit, when not publicly flogging his forever enemy, The Globe and Mail, he has at least called for a public inquiry). But the dozen-or-so gaslighting tweets per day should tell the public everything they need to know about how worried these Liberals are that the leaks won’t stop, and that they carry weight.

With the Official Opposition set to force a vote on Tuesday that will test the very foundations of the Liberal-NDP blood pact, as well as Jagmeet Singh’s everyman principles and bonafides (I’ll wait for you to stop laughing before we continue), you can bet your last Trudeau Foundation yuan that the worst of this Tru-Anon “hissy fit” is yet to come, and there’s no telling how low that Butts, and those like him, will go.

Jonathan Kay @jonkay

Watching Butts stage a week-long hissy fit over @globeandmail reporting is easily the most entertaining part of this story.

Gerald Butts @gmbutts

There used to be a line between reporting and opinion, however thin. Its erasure is another of the Globe’s contributions to Canadian journalism under its current leadership. https://t.co/rxb6PdW4f2

There are no red lines for the new Red Guard. Everything is in play, always. When they won’t even cede ground on the shaky optics of appointing a Trudeau Foundation member, family friend, and butterer of Xi Jinping’s bread as special ‘rapporteur’ into the young man he used to summer with, there’s little left to do but laugh.

It’s not as if Conservative hands are entirely clean on matters of Canadian politicians being worked like a lion dance on Chinese New Year. But the fact that they’re one of only two parties calling for an independent public inquiry, while the rest are out for the heads of the journalists and leakers who dared to venture headlong into the kind of Watergate territory that progressives used to care for, renders this whole exercise farcical.

So don’t get your hopes up this week, Singh will more than likely continue his indentured servitude, but do try to enjoy the show.

There are (many) more leaks to come, which means more filibusters, hissy fits, and more chances to flag those who have something to hide.

So thanks for the memories, Gerry. With apologies to Mark Gerretsen, or the ever-epistemic-creeping David Fisman, there may not be anyone more obnoxious on Canadian Twitter, but there’s no doubting Butts’s public utility.

For anyone still on the fence in regards to Beijing interference, and the Liberal role in rolling out the red carpet, he’s telling you it matters.

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