The Reinstatement of Butts Will Kick Trudeau's Liberals in The Butt

Gerald Butts, who resigned as Justin Trudeau's chief of staff last February in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin affair in which former Justice Minister Jody Raybould-Wilson was pressured to drop the corruption case against the top Montreal based Liberal donor, is now back in the Prime Minister's inner circle with the federal election only three months away.

It would appear that Trudeau believes that Canadians have moved on from the SNC-Lavalin scandal and feels free to bring back his old friend into the fold. This strikes me as a foolish gambit on the part of Trudeau because all it does is remind people of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and makes it news all over again.

In recent weeks, the Liberals had regained ground on the Tories largely because of the unpopularity of the Ontario Tory government of Doug Ford. Earlier this month I commented:

The key to ousting Trudeau's Liberals is in Ontario. As ham handed as the Trudeau government has been regarding SNC-Lavalin, voters in Ontario are not going to abandon Trudeau if they think Scheer will govern the way Ford has during his first year in office. Needless to say, Trudeau will move heaven and earth to make people believe that Scheer and Ford are blood brothers.

At this point, SNC-Lavalin is old news while the hijinks at Queens' Park is brand new. If Scheer spends the election campaign having to talk about Ford instead of Trudeau then the federal Tories will grab defeat from the jaws of victory. For his own political future, Scheer is going to have distance himself from Ford. Unless there are new developments in SNC-Lavalin or another new Trudeau scandal emerges, Scheer's hopes for a one term Liberal government might become sheer fantasy.

Well, the return of Butts is for all intents and purposes a new development in SNC-Lavalin. I suspect that whatever momentum the Liberals might have had will quickly evaporate. The return of Butts might prove to be kick in the butt that removes the Liberals from office in October.