National Post (National Edition)
I THOUGHT MICHAEL WERNICK WAS MAGNIFICENT. Blatchford.
Reminds us to be grateful for our public service
Into what sometimes seems the lair of the mealy-mouthed, there came Michael Wernick, the plain-talking Clerk of the Privy Council and the top civil servant in the country.
The 37-year career public servant was the third witness to testify Thursday at the justice committee allegedly examining the SNCLavalin affair and whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his ministers or staff improperly pressured then-attorney General Jody Wilson-raybould to overrule her director of public prosecutions, stop the prosecution of Snc-lavalin and instead negotiate with the giant Quebec company the corporate equivalent of a plea bargain, what’s called a deferred prosecution agreement or DPA.
Wilson-raybould, of course, was shuffled from the justice role to veterans affairs in January. She then resigned from cabinet Feb. 12 after the Globe and Mail reported she’d been pressed by the PMO to intervene in the SNCLavalin prosecution.
But Wernick’s answer, to summarize, was yes there was certainly pressure and lots of it and no, it was neither inappropriate nor unlawful.
“I’m quite sure the min- ister felt pressure,” Wernick said, meaning pressure “to get it right.” He exerted some of his own, in fact.
He said he called WilsonRaybould last Dec. 19 to check on a number of issues, among them the SNC file.
He told her some of her colleagues and the PM were quite concerned with what they were reading in the business press (SNC was loudly fretting about the effects of the prosecution upon shareholders, workers and indeed the company’s very future, and lobbying anything with a pulse) and wondered whether a DPA was still an option.
“If she (Wilson-raybould) felt (the pressure was untoward or improper) in September, October, November, December,” Wernick said, “she had recourse.
“She could have called the ethics commissioner any time, any day.
“She could have called the Prime Minister (He is apparently reachable to ministers pretty much 24-7).
“There were several cabinet meetings (in that period); she could have asked for a pull-aside. There were multiple occasions where she could have (done something).”
Wernick didn’t explicitly say this, but a reasonable reading of the whole of his testimony is that to his knowledge, and he has a firm grasp of most files, WilsonRaybould didn’t suffer any undue influence or intimidation — nothing that, as a capable minister, she shouldn’t have been able to handle.
(In other government roles, Wernick has known her for about 13 years, and considers her an ally and a friend.)
And handle it, remember, she did.
As Wernick pointed out a couple of times, despite the enormous SNC lobbying effort (“they were making the rounds of everyone that month,” he said) and the lobbying of those they lobbied, “The matter is proceeding to trial … The company did not get what it wanted.”
None of this was disreputable, he said.
Deferred prosecution agreements — they’re called remediation agreements in Canada — weren’t sneaked into law. They didn’t spring “from immaculate conception.” The government consulted; there were 370 participants in the consultation, some 70 written submissions. There is certainly a reasonable argument to be made that those who toil for companies, receive pensions, own shares, do subcontracting, etc. shouldn’t pay the price of executive misconduct — in the worst scenario, company failure.
As for meeting with SNC representatives, Wernick said, “The company is not a pariah. It has not been convicted. It has not gone to trial.”
And for all its checkered past, overseas and in Quebec, the pitch SNC “made to me, made to so many people”, is that the SNC of 2018 is not the SNC of the early 2000s, that it has reformed its corporate culture.
“If you boil it down for Canadians as to what’s going on here,” Wernick said once, it’s that “we’re discussing lawful advocacy for the minister to take a lawful decision which she did not take.”
He began, as committee witnesses usually do, with an opening statement some are construing as partisan. I didn’t take it that way.
He spoke first of the things which do worry him — the potential of “foreign interference in the upcoming election”; “the rising tides of incitements to violence” and the casual use of words like “traitor,” which has him concerned that “somebody is going to be shot in this country this year, during the political cam- paign”; “the reputations of honourable people who have served their country being besmirched and dragged through the market square” and the “vomitorium of social media.”
But is he worried about the rule of law in this country?
He is not.
Seven years after the RCMP began investigating SNC, four years after charges were laid, “and up until now, the matter is proceeding to trial.”
The director of public prosecutions made her tough call; the then-ag made hers. The Lobbying Act worked; people know just how many times SNC met MPS, staffers, or government officials and at least the broad strokes of what they discussed. The Ethics Commissioner “selfinitiated” his probe into the matter.
For the record, Wernick said everything he has heard the PM, his staff or cabinet ministers say (and he was at some of the meetings with Wilson-raybould) about SNC is that the decision “was hers to make”.
He has spent decades in and around other prime ministers, Liberals and Conservatives. “They are always guided by trying to do the right thing,” he said. “The exceptions are extremely rare, and they are detected and punished.”
I thought he was magnificent.
As the former law clerk of the Senate, Mark Audcent, put the H back in the honourable Red Chamber when he testified at the criminal trial of Mike Duffy (who was acquitted), so did Michael Wernick give the adult’s explanation of this whole mess.
And in the process, he provided a heartening reminder that in this country, among the many things for which we ought to be grateful is our public service.