No matter what was going to happen, it was going to be a turning point.  The last time a Prime Minister testified before a House of Commons committee because he was in political hot water was on March 3, 1932.  Then, as of now, there were allegations of misuse of funds from the Canadian treasury at a time of an economic crisis.

But now, as opposed to then, the government is in a minority situation and this could be the scandal that could bring down the government.  Certainly, that is the growing hope of the opposition.  The Conservatives asked for Justin Trudeau's resignation.  The Bloc Québécois followed suit.  The NDP, while playing along to investigate the WE scandal, has not gone as far, yet.  There is more to investigate and no rush to pass judgment even before the Ethics Commissioner renders judgement, I am told.

So for an hour and a half, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was probed about the events and the timeline that led his Liberal government to give a sole source contract, er, contribution agreement to WE to oversee a program offering $10 an hour to students and graduates who agreed to volunteer, a program which was estimated at first to almost cost a billion dollars to Canadian taxpayers.

The Prime Minister was prepared, but not too prepared.  The initial round of questions, questions that were obviously going to be asked, were about the amounts paid to Trudeau's family members by WE and its subsidiaries.  Trudeau hadn't done his homework and couldn't provide specific answers.  Or there was no way in hell you would catch him saying that his family had received half-a-million dollars from WE.

But we learned that Trudeau first learned that WE was going to administer the program on May 8th.  This was the recommendation of the public service, apparently.  One wrinkle in the timeline is that WE was authorized to spend money related to the program on May 5th.  Despite that, Trudeau pushed back and asked for a review, because he knew this deal with WE was going to be scrutinized, partly because of the Trudeaus' links with WE.  A yelllow flag which led the public service to return on May 21st to reaffirm WE was the only organization able to deliver the program.  The flag never turned red in Trudeau's head.

We also learned that the Canadian Student Service Grant program was short on options: It was, we were told, a binary choice: WE ou NON.  But when asked if WE was indeed a good choice to run the program, Trudeau said that we will never know, because they had to pull out.  An incredible response, really, considering that Justin Trudeau repeated weeks before, time and time again, that WE was the only choice.  The only choice could have been a bad choice, then?

Trudeau, who has already been blamed twice by the Ethics Commissioner, (once for his luxurious vacation on the Aga Khan's private island, and the second time for his role in the SNC-Lavalin affair), was not particularly contrite.  "I was not and I am not in a situation of conflict of interest," he said.  Why did he apologize for not recusing himself, then?  Because of  the "perception" that he may have been in a conflict of interest, which brought the demise of this program and left students who were counting on this money looking at an empty wallet.  That is his only regret, we are told.

Sadly for Trudeau, the perception of a conflict of interest very much means that you are in a conflict of interest.  That is why others are perceiving it that way and that is why rules are in place.  Justin Trudeau once again demonstrated that ethics is a blind spot, because after all they were doing all of this to help Canadian students.  Just like he was trying to save SNC jobs.  Just like he needed a vacation.

That said, the committee meeting went better for Justin Trudeau, and his chief of staff Katie Telford who testified after him, than it did for Mark and Craig Kielburger.  Telford, in fact, was very much in control and seemed to be having fun, most of the time.

Well versed in the art of political debate and deflections, Trudeau and Telford were able, when provided with open-ended questions or points of debate, to survive the session.  They were both put on the defensive when questions were more precise and pointed, but never was the opposition able to fully connect all the dots that need connecting for Canadians to really understand what went wrong and why the Trudeau Liberals should be punished for it.

It is quite possible that the Ethics Commissioner finds Justin Trudeau (and Bill Morneau) guilty of breaching the Code of Ethics.  But Trudeau survived the day and for now, the ones paying the real price for this political storm are the Kielburger brothers and WE.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star