Johnston focus helped Liberals

Until this week I naively thought David Johnston’s stumbles and bungles were a big problem for the government that appointed him.

But after his painful threehour appearance before a parliamentary committee, I now realize that what may have started out as a problem was actually an advantage. I doubt the government planned it this way. I expect they genuinely thought Johnston was so credible that whatever he concluded about holding an independent inquiry into foreign interference would be broadly accepted by the public and even by most parties in Parliament.

But when it didn’t turn out that way, when Johnston’s badly flawed interim report and his past ties with the Trudeau family led Parliament to demand his resignation, there was still a silver lining to be found in the cloud darkening the government’s plan.

Which is that the more Johnston stumbled, the more he insisted that he should be trusted, that those personal ties don’t add up to real conflicts of interest, and that the obvious holes in his report don’t much matter, the more it became all about him.

He became a big fat piñata hanging out there that the government’s critics could whack to their heart’s content. In the process he was badly bruised, but the government that put him in this impossible position was managing once again to duck the main issues.

In part it was able to do that because the opposition, quite predictably, went right for the bait dangled so temptingly in front of it. Johnston’s history with the Trudeaus, père et fils, and his connections to the Pierre Trudeau Foundation, are irresistible for the Conservatives in particular.

So every time Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sneered at Johnston (a former governor general, after all) as Justin Trudeau’s “ski buddy” it not only smeared Johnston but made Poilievre look like the petty partisan he is.

That in turn allowed the Liberals to take the high road. They’d much prefer we focus on the shoddy treatment meted out to Johnston instead of dwelling on their epic mismanagement of the foreign interference file.

In that sense, Johnston was the perfect man for the job. It just depends what the job was, and until Friday it was best summed up as acting as a human lightning rod for critics.

And it must be said he did a bang-up job at that. In the meantime, of course, the actual issues haven’t gone away. They’ve just been shoved to one side while public attention wanders off to other matters like higher interest rates and air so smoky you can taste it.

This is really too bad. It was notable this week that while Johnston’s committee appearance inspired thousands of words, a visit to Parliament Hill the next day by some of the people most directly affected by Chinese government meddling went largely unnoticed by comparison.

The Bloc Québécois, oddly enough, arranged for leaders of groups representing Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese and Hong Kong people to voice their concerns. They made the important point that while the politicians squabble over how Johnston was handling the issue, their communities remain vulnerable to hostile influence. Johnston, they noted, didn’t even consult them before publishing his report.

All these groups have been raising the alarm about Chinese government intimidation of Canadians in Canada for years. They’ve issued a string of reports themselves — a group called Alliance Canada Hong Kong came out with a new one titled Murky Waters just over a week ago, documenting Beijing’s “increasingly aggressive influence activities” in this country. And yet here we all were, obsessing about Johnston’s reputation. If that doesn’t amount to distraction, I don’t know what does.