Keeping as tight a lid as possible

Scared Liberal rabbits axe any real probe

There was never any doubt the liberal majority on the commons justice committee would block an investigation into the Snc-lavalin affair. the only question was how.

the frightened rabbits on the government side were not about to investigate their masters in the prime Minister’s Office, let alone on such an explosive question as whether they had attempted to tamper with a criminal prosecution.

But what form would the stonewall take? Would they flatly reject any such inquiry? that would presumably have been too crude.

Would they hold hearings, call witnesses, but with the understanding that none of them would say anything: cabinet confidentiality, solicitor-client privilege, extensive memory loss, whatever? that, too, would have looked a little too plead-the-fifthish for comfort.

So instead the five liberal Mps voted for an investigation — such transparency! — only with a list of witnesses that mysteriously excluded anyone who was actually involved.

rather than the former minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-raybould, or the prime minister’s principal secretary, Gerry Butts, or the prime minister’s chief of staff, Katie telford, or any of the other names that might come to mind in a matter involving officials in the prime Minister’s Office allegedly pressuring Wilson-raybould to have fraud and corruption charges dropped against Quebec’s largest construction firm, the liberal list included only the current minister of justice, his deputy, and the clerk of the privy council. (though they might call other witnesses! eventually! You never know!)

And rather than look into the alleged attempt to interfere in a criminal prosecution, the committee would confine itself to the broader merits of “remediation agreements,” SNC-Lavalin’s chosen alternative to prosecution which the government obligingly slipped into an omnibus budget bill last year after only a few dozen meetings with the company’s lobbyists. Oh, and it would meet in camera.

Meanwhile, the prime minister was holding a press conference in which he again attempted to make the issue, not whether his staff had leaned on the former attorney general to go easy on a Liberal-friendly firm in a politically important province, but what she did or did not do in response.

As he had the previous day, Justin Trudeau said that “if she felt that she had received pressure” it was “her responsibility to come to talk to me. She did not do that.” Moreover, “she continued to serve in this government” as veterans affairs minister after she was dumped from justice in last month’s cabinet shuffle.

This implied without quite saying so that Wilson-Raybould — if it was indeed she who made the allegation — had made the whole thing up. Or that she, rather than his advisers, was somehow derelict in her duty. Or perhaps the former Crown prosecutor is merely mistaken, confusing what the prime minister’s people have called “vigorous debate” with improper interference.

Would he waive solicitor-client privilege, then, to allow her to give her side of things? Well, he allowed, he was looking into it, but he’d already had certain “unintended consequences” flagged to him, what with there being a couple of court cases that might be affected. So: no, in other words.

It has been observed that Wilson-Raybould is the first minister ever to resign from cabinet without giving a reason. She is also likely the first to lawyer up on her way out the door, having hired a former Supreme Court judge, Thomas Cromwell, to advise her on what she can and cannot say. It would seem she anticipates a fight. It would seem she is right.

The prime minister and his staff, it is now clear, are going to throw everything they have at her, smearing her credibility even as they invoke solicitor-client privilege to stop her from answering. They are going to try to keep as tight a lid on this thing as they can, and hope either the public loses interest or the opposition loses heart, for fear of getting offside with opinion in Quebec.

The province’s political class has closed ranks, as it so often does, in defence of SNCLavalin, or more particularly in support of giving it a pass on the charges it has been trying so strenuously to avoid. Particular emphasis has been attached to the company’s claim that it would be forced out of business if it were convicted on charges of bribing public officials in Libya, as this would also forbid it from bidding on federal contracts for up to 10 years.

It would seem that it is cruel and unusual punishment to ask a company with a long record of bribing officials, foreign and domestic, to win public contracts to take a time out from bidding on public contracts. After all, the company has changed! And what about all those blameless people in its employ?

This is a novel theory of justice. If I were to rob a bank, it would not suffice to avoid charges for me to declare I was a changed man, or had mouths to feed. The provision disqualifying firms convicted of crimes from federal contracts has been on the books since 2006; the company would have known, even as it was allegedly plying Libyan officials with bribes, that this was the likely consequence if it were caught. It presumably bet that it wouldn’t be. Should it now be relieved of that consequence, it would essentially be paying off on that bet.

More to the point, it would be signalling to other firms contemplating bribing public officials that the same bet can work for them. Heads you win the contract, tails you maybe pay a fine. I’d have thought Quebec of all places would be wary of sending such a message.