A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE

Why didn’t Wilson-Raybould resign her post?

It is my experience that truth is most often found in the middle, or as the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus said rather more poetically, “in the depths.”

With that lens, imagining just for a minute that truth generally lies between extremes, consider again the SNC- Lavalin/ Jody WilsonRaybould business.

(The caveat is that, speaking of depths, I am somewhat out of mine, in that I have never worked in Ottawa as a political reporter precisely because I find the place greasy and incestuous, and generally regard it with suspicion.)

Thus far, the prevailing narrative goes as follows.

The former attorney general is a heroic and even noble figure who stood her ground as all around her, sinister forces — the slipslidey folk of the Prime Minister’s Office including former principal secretary Gerald Butts, plus Justin Trudeau himself, and others in cabinet, plus the SNC lobbyists — leaned on her to change her mind and negotiate a plea with SNC instead of continuing with the fraudand- briber y prosecution underway, and then punishing her, when she bravely refused to yield, by booting her out of the AG’s office as soon as possible.

Wilson-Raybould has yet to speak her truth, as that loathsome phrase goes, and depending on how frank she believes she can be at the justice committee next week, it may well be that this is exactly what she will say happened.

But even if that’s so, there are some unanswered questions about this scenario.

The first is, was the pressure from the PMO ( and other ministers and officials such as clerk of the privy council Michael Wernick, who earlier this week admitted calling Wilson-Raybould in December of last year to give her some “context” for the potential consequences the SNC prosecution might have) improper?

Did all this breach what’s called the Shawcross doctrine — the name comes from a speech made by the late Sir Hartley Shawcross, a brilliant English lawyer who was then the AG and was talking about attorney-general/prosecutorial independence — and which is also practised in Canada?

At the heart of the doctrine is that the attorney general must be fully independent and in control of her own processes.

Designed to protect AG independence, Shawcross doesn’t mean an AG can’t consult her colleagues, or even that they can’t tell her about real considerations they believe she may have ignored, but that she is not to be put under pressure. Trudeau, Butts and Wernick — the only significant voices heard, in various ways, thus far — have been adamant that they did nothing improper or inappropriate and that Wilson- Raybould was always aware the decision was hers and hers alone.

Wernick, in fact, said he’s content to leave this issue for the ethics commissioner to determine, and appeared confident his judgment would be confirmed.

And if Wilson- Raybould felt she was being subjected to undue pressure, Wernick said, why didn’t she object?

She had numerous avenues and opportunities to do so, and he mentioned an array of these, from a call to the PM or the ethics commissioner to a “pull- aside” at cabinet, but to his knowledge, she didn’t avail herself of any of these opportunities.

(It must be said that neither Wilson- Raybould nor Trudeau appeared to give much of a whit about all that vaunted independence when they were tweeting their “thoughts” about the verdict in the Gerald Stanley case early last year. “As a country we can and must do better,” Wilson-Raybould wrote. “I am committed to working everyday to ensure justice for all Canadians,” thus suggesting in a plausibly deniable way that the verdict was wrong and that justice for the Indigenous man, Colten Boushie, who was killed by Stanley wasn’t so hot.)

Now Wernick didn’t suggest Wilson-Raybould could have resigned, but she could have, of course — the question of why she didn’t hangs fatly in the air.

It’s not unprecedented, as my more learned legal colleagues have pointed out: B.C. attorney general Brian Smith did just that in 1988, over precisely the same issue — he quit because he could no longer carry out his duties without “the support of the premier and his office, who do not appreciate the unique independence that is the cornerstone of the attorney general’s responsibilities in a free parliamentary democracy.”

Only by resigning and speaking out when he did, Smith said, could he protect the sanctity and tradition of the AG’s office.

Wilson- Raybould stayed in office, accepted her shuffle to veterans affairs in midJanuary, and did not resign until Feb. 12, a few days after a Globe and Mail story alleged she had been “pressed” to change her mind on SNC.

Did she imagine that her particularly potent credentials ( she is an Aboriginal woman), which are so very important to this prime minister and his government, meant that she would not, could not, be moved?

Did she gamble that those credentials would protect her?

She still could have resigned if not in the moment of all that pressure then at this moment — refused the shuffle and stood on a point of principle, quit the cabinet but remained as an MP.

Where is truth in the murky middle here?

It was Sir Shawcross who said, this at the Nuremberg trials where he was the English prosecutor, “There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer his own conscience.”