The Line digs up the ghost of Jon Vance to skewer the PMO CoS’s line that she tells JT everything.
Also: social media's problems, here and abroad. And why the Trudeau Foundation has got to go.
open.substack.com
Because this serious allegation of misconduct against Canada's top soldier — a powerful man accused of exploiting a woman he had power over — got all the way to the top of our self-styled feminist government and ... died. It was looked into it a bit, and then nothing happened. Vance continued to serve for several more years, retiring of his own volition slightly before the Global first broke news of the scandal.
There's two problems here for the PMO. The first is the obvious appalling hypocrisy of a "feminist" government essentially shrugging when a woman appealed for help through the only official channel available to her. Telford, testifying about all of this in 2021, agreed that more needed to have been done. No kidding. She also lamented that the woman making the accusation had no place to go. As Line editor Gurney noted in a National Post column at the time, that's not at all true. The woman had a place to go: the PMO, via the defence minister and ombudsperson. The woman got where she was supposed to go. It's just that when she got there, right into Telford's office, no one cared enough to do anything.
That's not not having a place to go. That's having a place to go, and being ignored when you get there.
But there was another problem with Telford's testimony in 2021, as well as the prime minister's comments: they continued to insist that while they knew there'd been some kind of allegation against Vance, they didn't know what it was. "Nobody knew that it was a 'Me Too' complaint," Trudeau said in 2021. In her testimony, Telford said something similar: “I assumed this could have been a serious allegation. But I had absolutely no information about it.”
Bullshit. Wrong. Inaccurate. A lie. Global News had already reported by that point that internal communications in the PMO, which they obtained and reported on, included specific reference to "allegations of sexual harassment." It was right in the emails. It's clear that no one knew all the details when the report first reached the PMO, and it's possible that the PM himself was kept carefully isolated from some of what was known, but the documents already on the record revealed that the PMO's position was to lie about what they knew and when.