Excellent read from FB

"A friend of a friend 's friend of a friend wrote this and I thought it was pretty spot on, so I asked to borrow it.

"It struck me that under Harper's secretive governance we, the public, would never have seen a hearing like we saw yesterday. That is what transparency looks like, warts and all.

"The author doesn't want attribution.:"

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"There is an old saying attributed to Prince Bismarck that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” So when one considers that Trudeau, Butts, Wernick and Wilson-Raybould are all on the record denying that anything nefarious, from a legal standpoint, went on in the SNC Lavalin affair then all we are left with is the sausage-making. No obstruction of justice. No legal lines being crossed. Just plain old politicians and public servants negotiating back and forth behind the scenes in an attempt to get to the outcome they see as most beneficial for Canadians."

"In government negotiations, one person's "veiled threats" could be another person's "serious advice". One person's "narrow partisan interests" could be another person's "national interests." One person's "inapropriateness" could be another person's "policy sales pitch". (I'm thinking mostly of what Morneau offered up to Wilson-Raybould with the latter) Anyway, it's all in the eyes of the beholder as I see it. And to be perfectly frank, if the Trudeau government is guilty of anything it is that their openness plan revealed too much government sausage-making. And now we are talking more about the making of it, and less about the sausage itself. And because of that they are now suffering the consequences."

"They allowed JWR to speak her version of the truth to committee, mostly a detailed account of what went on behind the scenes, in front of a huge national audience. Her version of sausage-making. That's not the actions of a majority government with something to hide. It's the opposite. And let me tell you that would never have been a problem for the secretive and autocratic government of the previous conservative office holders. Harper would have cut Jody Wilson-Raybould loose in a New York minute and threatened any others who dared to come forward in public and speak their truth to power." /end

"I believe Michael Wernick, who has been a senior bureaucrat under both Conservatives and Liberal governments when he says no cabinet minister is an island, and that kind of pressure is neither unusual nor improper. And I believe Jody Wilson-Raybould, a rookie politician with a tough job who had options - an ethics complaint, a private call to the PM, resigning, or seeking an outside legal opinion - which she did not pursue. And I believe the Ethics Commissioner, who had already agreed to investigate following a complaint from the Opposition only because the media had made it in to a matter of public interest. So as far as we know, at least to this point, everyone did and is doing the right thing, and everything else is partisan click-bait."

"And in case anyone has missed it, that is pretty much what has our neighbors tearing out each other's throats. I'd like us to be better than that now, rather than waiting for an Elijah Cummings to remind us when we can no longer remember. "