On Aug. 14, Canada’s Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion released his report on the SNC-Lavalin controversy that captured the nation’s attention . . .
earlier this year, ruling that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act in his attempts to influence then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould (JWR).
Dion found that Trudeau and several top staffers sought to aid the beleaguered engineering giant in avoiding prosecution for bribing Libyan officials, including Muammar Gaddafi’s murderous offspring, for billions of dollars in infrastructure contracts.
The report details how lobbyists for SNC-Lavalin quietly pushed behind the scenes for tailor-made legislation that would let them avoid litigation, called a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), and slipped it into the 2018 omnibus budget bill.
If convicted, the fraud and bribery charges SNC-Lavalin is facing would disqualify them from bidding on government contracts for 10 years, as well as allow the government to scrap any of their numerous current contracts. They also faced similar charges of bribery and corruption in numerous other countries, which indicates that this is less about a few bad apples and more about systemic greed and the belief that they were above the law due to their status as an economic titan.
Judging by the ease with which they bent the ears of the most powerful people in Canada, it’s no wonder they thought that way. What a shock it must have been to encounter someone who prioritizes the rule of law over a private company’s quarterly earnings.
As the report shows, senior government staffers were consulting with SNC’s legal council to find “solutions” to the predicament at the same time they were assuring JWR that it was her call to make.
She stood by the decision of her director of public prosecutions to decline the use of a DPA, as it would be precedent-setting for an AG to intervene.
Partisan swine on social and mainstream media platforms second-guessed her reasoning, they labelled her “difficult” and the tinfoil-hat crowd even insinuated that this was all a stunt on behalf of a rival political party. They originally denied that JWR was inappropriately pressured, then tried to lambaste her for submitting taped evidence to the justice committee showing Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick doing just that:
“But [Trudeau] wants to know why the DPA route, which Parliament provided for, isn’t being used. And I think he’s going to find a way to get it done, one way or another,” he said in a phone call just before Christmas 2018.
JWR was shuffled to Veteran’s Affairs in January and resigned from cabinet shortly after the Globe and Mail broke the story in February.
Dion’s findings have only reinforced her side of the story, which was already far more credible than the official party dogma. But the most disturbing of his revelations was that even he, the Ethics Commissioner, was denied access to cabinet confidences, leading him to write that he was unable to fulfill the full extent of his investigative duties as bestowed upon him by law. The decision to stonewall him, an outrageous abuse of power, came from un-elected bureaucrats at the Privy Council Office.
This entire debacle was an incredibly ham-fisted attempt to subvert the impartiality of Canada’s justice system by the highest officials in the land, and everyone involved seems to have avoided punishment. Well, almost everyone.
Wernick retired early and Trudeau’s principal secretary Gerald Butts resigned, only to be hired back as a campaign advisor. JWR and her fellow cabinet minister Jane Philpott were the ones who got booted from caucus and now face the uphill battle running as independents. Their former colleagues have chosen who they stand with, and this fall we’ll see if their cynical calculation pays off.
The Trudeau Liberals rose to power in 2015 on the strength and cohesion of their progressive messaging, from women’s rights to “open and transparent” governance and electoral reform. This time around, they won’t be taken at their word.
Caleb Nickerson
