WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? COYNE,

versations with him and his cabinet after she was shuffled out of Justice. The prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has agreed to testify before the committee, but no current employee of the prime minister’s office has yet been called, nor have any of the others Wilson- Raybould identified as having pressured her to go easy on SNCLavalin, save the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick.

Demands for a public inquiry, then, or at least for all of the relevant witnesses to be called before the committee, are closer to the mark. Whatever the prime minister and his people may or may not be guilty of, they cannot be allowed to get away with this blatant stonewalling. So, too, the Conservative and NDP leaders were justified in calling for Parliament to continue to sit next week, rather than take the next two weeks off. Indeed, they would be within their rights to hold up all parliamentary business, including the budget, until they get satisfaction. It is that important.

Wilson- Raybould’s stunning testimony, then, is not the end of this affair. It is just the beginning. It is essential to get to the bottom of it, not only that the public might know who did what this time, but to prevent the same thing from happening again. The best safeguard against future abuses is present accountability.

Unless you think WilsonRaybould is flat out lying, something has gone very wrong with the culture of this government. I don’t mean the desire to spare the company’s employees from hardship, or even the concern for the political repercussions in Quebec, but the apparently widespread assumption that the way to attend to these was to corrupt a prosecution and trample over the independence of the attorney general.

Even if you think she erred in refusing to order the director of public prosecutions to stay charges of bribery and fraud against SNC- Lavalin in favour of a remediation agreement, you must concede it is her call to make. Even if you think there were mitigating circumstances in this case, you must agree that decisions on prosecutions should be made free of political interference. And even if you think it is permissible for the attorney general to seek the advice of colleagues on a decision to prosecute, you must object to the full-court press to which she was subjected.

Whether or not any laws were broken is not the issue. The standard expected of public officials is not that they should merely avoid committing crimes. And politicizing prosecutions — making decisions about whether to prosecute contingent on what connections the accused might have in government or the political cost to the party in power or who lobbies on their behalf — is about as serious as it gets. For those in power to enable law- breaking by others is every bit as much of an assault on the rule of law as if they had broken the laws themselves.

The prime minister, according to Wilson-Raybould, was very much at the centre of these efforts. But even if he hadn’t been, the culture is set at the top. He is responsible for what ministers, staff and civil servants do in his name. Neither can he, or they, hide behind claims of ignorance: either that they did not know it was wrong to pressure the attorney general with regard to a prosecution, or that they were unaware of her repeated objections to being so pressured.

There has been much talk, in the wake of this scandal, of the desirability of separating the offices of minister of justice and attorney general, as they are in Britain, so as to insulate the attorney general from any possibility of interference. That may well be advisable, as structural fixes often are: it is not enough to trust in the willingness of people in power not to abuse it. But neither is it enough to rely on structural fixes.

The independence of the attorney general is already supposed to be ironclad — the convention is one of the bedrocks of Canada’s system of government. The office of the DPP was likewise set up to be (largely) independent of the attorney general. And yet a brigade of senior officials in this government was apparently quite prepared, not to say determined, to break through both barriers, undeterred by either. Only the resistance of an uncommonly principled attorney general prevented them from getting away with it.

Conventions, laws, regulations: all are valuable and necessary. But rules are no substitute for will — the willingness to abide by the rules. Whatever structural reforms might be in order, a few heads on pikes might prove equally salutary.