Reupping my column from today's Post, with a thread to go with it! Yay! A Twitter thread!

In order to understand why what the Liberals are doing is outrageous, you need to understand that the sexual misconduct scandal is actually two different scandals. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-gurney-desperate-liberals-hire-judge-to-shield-trudeau-from-vance-allegations

The first scandal is the one inside the armed forces, where too many of our service members — not all of them women, but many of them — are subjected to harassment and even outright sexual violence by fellow service members, and can't access justice or find protection. +

I'm not going to expound on this at length, because there are smarter people who have said it better than I could. But this is the first scandal: the one inside the CAF, the one that has been carefully and recently studied, and the one that needs actions.

That's Scandal 1. +

Sajjan's tapping of Arbour to do another damned report into this is mostly for show. A distraction and diversion. To the extent that it does have any positive effect — there will be SOME, I'm sure — it will be limited to Scandal 1.

Now let's talk Scandal 2. +

The second scandal isn't inside the Armed Forces. It's not one that was studied in recent years. It's not one that the new study will examine. It's a political scandal, a failure of political leadership, inside the PMO.

It. Is. Not. The. Same. Scandal. As. Scandal. 1. +

Scandal 2 is that an allegation of misconduct was brought to the PMO, via the Minister of National Defence, through a proper channel. And they buried it.

They've tried to deny this, or pretend they didn't know it was about. But that's bullshit and that's objectively clear now. +

Under examination at various times, senior Liberals, in both Defence and the PMO, have now acknowledged that they were told. There's been a lot of buck passing, but that's just spasmodic at this point. The truth is out. +

Once it was clear that there was no way to deny that senior officials knew about the allegations, there was a brief, adorable attempt to pretend that the government didn't know that they were MeToo allegations. But, like, gosh. That had already been publicly confirmed. +

Global News already has the documents on that. In internal communications, the allegations against Vance were being openly discussed as concerning "sexual harassment."

The government's latest defence didn't just die a quick death. It was stillborn.

+

Again, folks, we don't need any smoking guns here. The facts are now in fully public view:

1. Defence and PMO were told.
2. They knew it was a matter of sexual harassment, or at least OUGHT to have known — not knowing at this point would be negligent.
3. They did nothing.

+

That's the second scandal. It's a political scandal, entirely contained within the Trudeau government, at a high level. Indeed, all the way up to the highest level — the PMO.

They were told. They knew. They discussed it internally. And they buried it.

+

There's a lot going on in the world right now, to put it mildly. The closest hospital to me has a field unit now. The next-closest hospital almost ran out of O2 yesterday.

I don't blame anyone for being focused on other things.

But remember: the PM is COUNTING on that.

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