See ya later, Navigator!

Another swashbuckling PR rescue by Navigator Ltd.

A week and a half after he hired Jaime Watt’s bril’ crisis coms team, embattled Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly went for the high jump in a miasma of diesel fumes and anonymous recriminations from his underlings – some of them secret donors to Clustertruck 2022.

Navigator, aka Home of the Whopper, has of course rehabilitated the reputations of such national treasures as the Hon. Michael Bryant (killed a cyclist) and the Rt. Hon. Byron Muldoon (pocketed bribes).

Less successfully, they repped incurable romantics Jian Ghomeshi and Jacob Hoggard, the Hedley frontcreep, before turning tail and abandoning both to the baying social media mob.

Ghomeshi, in a New York Review of Books tear-jerker, recalled, “The professional team that I had hired as experts to guide me through the explosion bolted, too — but not before they had cheered on some ill-advised social media postings and threatened lawsuits.”

Readers may recall Ghomeshi’s abortive $50M lawsuit against the CBC and credulity-straining attempt to tell his side of the story in a Facebook post. The tin-eared gambits only inspired more of the Persian perv’s victims to go public, even as his defenders disappeared faster than you could say Big Ears Teddy. Exit Navigator, spinning.

Bonus own goal: When Corpse brass learned that Navigator had orchestrated Ghomeshi’s lawsuit against them, they fired Wattles from his gigs on The National’s weekly Insiders panel and Power and Politics.

“All I would say about that episode is that clients make their own decisions, and I’d be very careful concluding about what our advice was, or what our advice was not, in that case. It would be a mistake to, on the face of it, conclude what advice might have been,” Jaime told the FP. (Navigator client Muldoon’s opening gambit in the Airbus schmozzle was, incidentally, also a $50M lawsuit.)

Similarly, by the time Navigator was dressing Sloly for his press conferences (ex-Liberal spokesliar Matthew Barnes babysitting), the comms weasels were already prophylactically putting it about that the chief was deviating from their genius script. It’s hardly the spin doctor’s fault the patient’s terminal. Er, that’ll be $80,000 please!

Consider also Dean French’s fabulous work as negotiator between Mayor Jim Watson’s office and convoy leadership and marvel that, in a crunch, Duffer Harris’ original Little Shits™ can somehow still capture that pungent old magic of 1994.