Among the 60 people who gathered at a downtown Ottawa hotel for a day and a half this month to discuss the Liberal government's campaign for re-election was Gerry Butts, the senior adviser and close friend of Justin Trudeau who left the Prime Minister's Office five months ago in the midst of Trudeau's painful spring.

In February, Butts stepped away because his presence — and the suggestion that he was somehow involved in inappropriately pressuring the former attorney general — threatened to be a drag on the government's ability to pursue its mandate. From the outside, Butts was able to mount his own defence against Jody Wilson-Raybould's accusations.

The return of Butts (who was widely credited with helping to define the Trudeau Liberal message and narrative in the first place) might reassure Liberals who valued his contribution to the 2015 campaign and the first three-and-a-half years of the Trudeau government.
His return is also a significant part of the Liberal band getting back together in the hopes of recording a follow-up to their smashing breakthrough in 2015 — even though this re-election bid is bound to be a very different challenge.

Butts's exact role in the campaign is unclear. Speaking to the Huffington Post in May, Butts indicated he was looking toward the private sector. He also acknowledged that he would be readily available to any Liberal who came calling and suggested that his own enthusiasm for the mission hadn't dimmed.

The new-old Liberal crew

"It's no secret that I have a lot of friends who are still actively involved, whom I care about very deeply, and I care about my country very deeply," Butts said. "And I think that what is happening and how we're experiencing it in Canada, we're at a really important moment, in particular on the issues that I care most about, like climate change. We're at a turning point and it's important for people who care about those issues to get involved and try and make positive change happen."

Trudeau is more closely associated with Butts than he is with any other single adviser. But since he launched his quest for the federal Liberal leadership in 2012, Trudeau has gradually accumulated a slate of long-serving aides who will accompany him into the 2019 campaign.

In the beginning there was Butts, a friend to Trudeau since university, and Katie Telford, a friend of Butts's from their time together as senior figures in Dalton McGuinty's government. Telford got to know Trudeau when she was running Gerard Kennedy's campaign for the Liberal leadership in 2006, which Trudeau had endorsed. Telford became Trudeau's chief of staff after the 2015 election and formed an inseparable duo with Butts.

Tom Pitfield, a childhood friend of Trudeau's (Pitfield's father, Michael, was clerk of the Privy Council under Pierre Trudeau), was enlisted to begin building Trudeau's digital operation. Mike McNair, who had worked with Telford in Stéphane Dion's office, was recruited to help with policy.

The pros and cons of experience

Ben Chin, an adviser in Trudeau's office who is also expected to fill a senior role in the campaign this fall, was not involved in 2015, but he was in attendance at the weekend retreat in the summer of 2012 when the nascent Trudeau campaign began to take shape.

That an incumbent campaign would return to the same people who helped it win power is not entirely unusual; Jean Chrétien's re-election team in 1997 bore a strong resemblance to the team that helped build the Liberal victory in 1993. In theory, an experienced team should offer Trudeau an advantage against Conservative and NDP leaders facing their first federal campaigns.
Still, Butts's involvement might offer a handy excuse for the Liberals' political opponents to re-litigate the SNC-Lavalin affair, at least for a news cycle or two. The ethics commissioner's report on the affair is expected to be released sometime before the official campaign begins, which likely will revive the story regardless. Butts and Trudeau have maintained that Butts did nothing wrong. As long as the ethics commissioner agrees, they might not have to revisit those assurances.

Among the attendees at the Liberal retreat this month were the national campaign co-chairs, including Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains (Dominic LeBlanc, another co-chair, is being treated for cancer and did not attend) and a few officials who already had taken leave from their senior roles in ministers' offices to join Broadhurst at the Liberal Party's headquarters in Ottawa.
Maxime Bernier was a minor minister in Stephen Harper's cabinet. "Misinformation" and "foreign interference" had not yet entered the political lexicon. "Populism" was a quaint notion.
And Trudeau now has a record in office, with all the good and bad that entails.

All of this remains to play out. But regardless of the outcome, Trudeau will go with the team that helped get him here in the first place.

If the past few months of Canadian politics have taught us anything, it's that bile works. Weeks of Liberal caterwauling about abortion and hidden agendas have put Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back on top of the polls.

Desperate times brought desperate measures and they have, in turn, brought relief. There was a point in April, you'll recall, when the Trudeau government was desperate for something – anything — other than SNC-Lavalin to talk about. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the conversation had revolved around former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould, Prime Minister Trudeau, and their interactions over the ethically compromised engineering company. And to deleterious effect: the Liberals were sinking in the polls and Trudeau's approvals were taking a beating.

Moreover, no channel change seemed to be working. A report citing the coming climate apocalypse was leaked. The absence of an Andrew Scheer climate plan was noted. Repeatedly. A frustrated Trudeau then drummed Wilson-Raybould and former Treasury Board President Jane Philpott, who was also embroiled in the scandal, out of caucus. And still the Liberals bled.

Even worse, the breach of trust case involving Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who was accused of leaking confidential cabinet information, then stepped to the fore, once again casting Trudeau and his office in a dubious light. The prime minister who promised transparency failed to meet his own bar.

The public was regaled with tales of meetings between the country's top soldier and Trudeau's top foot soldiers at which, for some reason, no notes were taken. The government was also refusing to turn over material to Norman's defence. It looked bad and smelled worse.


Enter the abortion brigade.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in town to talk trade? Let's talk abortion instead. Some anti-abortionist who's buried so deeply on the opposition backbench he'll never be able to find a cabinet,  let alone serve in one, says he's sad about abortion on demand? Evidence of a plot! Is Conservative leader Andrew Scheer reciting how a government led by him won't reopen the abortion debate? Well, down is the new up, you rube, so run before they take your uterus away and lock it.

The recent brouhaha over the anti-abortion movie Unplanned, which will screen at some Canadian theatres this week, is but the latest front in the multi-pronged Liberal assault on an imaginary Gilead. Here, Tourism Minister Mélanie Joly was sent to savage Quebec entrepreneur and cinema chain owner Vincenzo Guzzo for allowing the film to be screened. Guzzo's true sin? Being a Conservative donor, which Joly made sure to note, making his chain's business decision proof — to Liberal eyes, anyway — of the impending Conservative assault on women's rights.



What makes this all so depressing is this crop of Liberals was supposed to be different. They were supposed to believe in evidence. They were supposed to be positive. What the abortion routine shows is they are neither of these things. In fact, they're the opposite; Trudeau's Liberals are cynical and divisive.
Now, I wouldn't like the prospect of access to safe and legal abortion being taken away any more than the average Liberal. But here's the thing: access to abortion, while uneven, isn't under threat in Canada. And you know how I know that? Trudeau has had four years to buttress access to abortion and has done the square root of nothing.

How can the purported party of evidence look at the nearly 10 years of Harper government and still detect signs of serious life in the anti-abortion movement? How is portraying Scheer's assurances as lies not corrosive to people's perceptions of public life? More to the point, are Canadians – Conservatives included — no longer allowed to express anti-abortion sentiment? Or are the Liberals now the arbiters of acceptable speech, too?

• OPINION We're adopting U.S. abortion anxieties as our own. They don't fit
• Trudeau to bring up anti-abortion laws in U.S. during meeting with VP Mike Pence
  

This is to complain about politics, I know. But the reason so many people are disappointed in politics at the moment is because they feel their leaders are untrustworthy. Repeating a pack of lies to evade a beating in the polls might work in the short term, but it does more long-term damage.

Not that the Liberals appear concerned. They're now on to conversion therapy — which attempts to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity — as the next front in the culture war.

Having turned down an opportunity to legislate against the practice in the spring session, the Liberals are now saying Scheer can't be trusted to do the right thing, even after Scheer said he is against forcing anyone into a therapy against their will. And instead of calling the Liberals out on their hysteria and hypocrisy, the media are gleefully writing the attack up, torqued headlines and all.

The Prime Minister's Office isn't even trying to hide their desperation now, so convinced are they that it's working. Trudeau's director of communications, for example, lobbed an untruth bomb into the first ministers' meeting this week, tweeting that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper had "frozen" health care spending, a claim that is as far from the truth as anything out of U.S. President Donald Trump's mouth. And to think: these are the very same people who want you to trust their monitoring of social media for truthfulness during the upcoming election.




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A tour of seniorPMO Twitter accounts is undoubtedly the best place to see where Liberal priorities are these days. You will find lots of conversion therapy, a heaping helping of abortion, and lots of partisan campaign photos. What you won't find is an equal dollop of concern for the two Canadians abducted in China, a looming global trade war, lack of movement on the NAFTA ratification, or the current fiscal position of the government, which will hamper any response to a downturn.
In other words, it's all politics all the time. Canadians can expect a steady stream of Liberal bile from here until election day.

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