The thing about l'affaire Lavalin, the part that really burns me up, is how much of a betrayal it feels like.

Not of me as some sort of Liberal partisan — readers of this space hopefully don't see me as one of those â€” but as someone who had some sincere hopes this government might live up to its lofty ideals of "real change."

That is now, quite plainly, a farce.

There have been signs along the way things had gone astray.  There's the quick ditching of electoral reform, the utter failure to even try to fix the access to information system because that might be awkward if people saw how government actually worked.  Who can forget the insistence on prosecuting an admiral for leaking information on ship building, while knowing someone else had also leaked similar information unpunished, and then going around and hiring the reporter the admiral leaked to.  And of course there's the daily onslaught of meaningless drivel coming out of the mouths of every spokesperson and minister.

But this, this thing with SNC-Lavalin has the feeling of a final break.  The culmination of what has been staring us in the face all along: this government is just like all the others.

And, you know, I'm not even sure whether the thing that's upsetting me is the pressure applied — excuse me, allegedly applied — by the prime minister's office to former attorney general and justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.

What the scandalous allegations, first broken by The Globe and Mail, have done is to bring into the open what the government plainly didn't want to talk about.

When they slipped in changes to the Criminal Code adding the possibility of "deferred prosecutions."  These are where, essentially, a company admits it did a bad thing, agrees to do better, and ponies up a bunch of cash as way of contrition.  What it avoids is that company being criminally sanctioned and cut off from, say, bidding on federal construction contracts for a decade.

Was this put in place solely for the benefit of SNC-Lavalin?  Who knows.  They certainly liked the idea, however.  Enough to send legions of lobbyists out to everyone with ears, eyes, or at least a faint pulse to make the case they should have their prosecution on charges of bribing Libyan officials deferred.

(If you'd like to read the root of all this, the Globe has reposted a feature about the whole mess from 2012 here.)

Well, anyway, lobbying or not the director of public prosecutions declined to start negotiating these agreements, because the company didn't qualify.  And then it seems that Wilson-Raybould wouldn't overrule that decision.  And sometime after that she was demoted.

Now she's left cabinet (but has met with them?) and Trudeau has apologized for nasty things about her (some of which could have been from his staff?).  Oh, and Gerald Butts has left the PMO (but he didn't do anything, he says).

There is some complexity here, and it's not entirely clear whether the PMO applying pressure would be strictly speaking illegal.  But that's not the point.

The point is here's a thing that was done that would greatly benefit a company whose senior executives have acted outside the law both abroad and here at home, and it was done without anyone making the case for it until they were looking down the barrel of a serious scandal.

Now the government is working backwards with their justifications.  Now we begin to hear about how this was saving jobs at an important engineering firm.  Why didn't we hear this when the changes were made?

It's quite simple, they didn't make the argument because they didn't want to.  They'd rather this whole thing happened with as little talking as possible.  Get the law on the books, make the deal happen and move on.

All the people coming out of the woodwork to talk about what a normal and usual thing it is for countries to have the agreements may have a point.  But it's a point that should have been made before it became law.  The only people who seem to have put any time looking the addition of deferred agreements to the Criminal Code were senators studying the budget bill.  And they're independent of the Liberal party now, you'll remember.

This, the whole debate we're having now, this was not supposed to happen.

That's the scandal.

This was a government that rode in promising to be different.  Instead, they're just like every other government.  Unwilling to face public scrutiny.  Unable to explain their actions.

It makes you wonder what the point of even becoming prime minister was.  What a waste.

Photo Credit: Edmonton Journal