A lawyer and lecturer at Thompson Rivers University, who specializes in constitutional law, doesn’t think much of the Prime Minister’s Office and its threat to sue the leader of the opposition for libel.

Jeffrey Meyers says Andrew Scheer would have a bevy of legal defences available to him in any libel suit.

“Significant defences are available. So I don’t think really what Mr. Trudeau wants to do is to litigate. This has happened before. These are usually threats that are then withdrawn.”

He is chalking the whole thing up to “political theatre.”

“My sense of it is since Gerald Butts left the PMO the Prime Minister is really kind of just flailing around in terms of how to respond and how to address the public. I think in this case inviting his lawyer to write a letter to Mr. Scheer and then have that letter publicly available threatening defamation I can’t really understand what the objective of that is. It is true I don’t think he wants to find himself in court.”

Meyers says the threat also is not new with former Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Jean Chretien both having threatened and dropped libel suits against opposition leaders.

The libel threat was made over comments accusing the Prime Minister of leading a campaign to politically interfere in the SNC Lavalin prosecution.

Today opposition leader Andrew Scheer doubled down on his comments repeating them outside the House daring the Prime Minister to follow through with his libel suit threat.