National Post (National Edition)
Trudeau talks, Butts testifies, Quebec shrugs
Anglo media hitting ‘summits of hyperbole’
O T TAWA • There remains such a divide between francophone and anglophone media coverage of the ongoing Snc-lavalin controversy that one Quebec headline Thursday morning read: “Justin and the two solitudes.”
Prime Minister Ju s - tin Trudeau’s former top adviser Gerald Butts, the clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick and the deputy minister of justice Nathalie Drouin testified in the Commons justice committee Wednesday, all of them rebutting, to varying degrees of success, the scathing testimony from former justice minister Jody Wilson-raybould last week that accused Trudeau and his entourage of attempting to politically interfere with a criminal prosecution.
For Wilson-raybould to overrule the Director of Public Prosecutions and offer a remediation agreement to Snc-lavalin, a Montreal giant facing corruption charges related to construction projects in Libya, would have been legal.
But she decided not to and questions in English Canada have generally swirled around whether officials crossed the line last fall in trying to make her change her mind — and whether that decision was the reason she was demoted from the justice ministry in January.
In Quebec, those questions are balanced by arguments about whether Wilson-raybould was wrong to decide against the remediation agreement in the first place, given the thousands of Quebec workers who could be affected by a criminal conviction for the company. As Joseph Facal put it in the Journal de Montreal Thursday, in his “two solitudes” column, Quebec columnists were not underestimating the potential gravity of the situation but they were being realistic while English Canada was reaching “summits in hyperbole.”
After Wilson-raybould’s testimony last week there was less sympathy for Trudeau and his stated concern over Snc-lavalin jobs — after all, she said his calculus seemed to be based on electoral politics.
But although many were still skeptical of the prime minister, Butts seemed to have got through to some of the province’s commentators on Wednesday.
In a panel on Radio-canada Wednesday, independent journalist Daniel Lessard said Butts had made several good arguments and came across as providing a credible version of events from the point of view of the prime minister’s office.
Wernick, meanwhile, had “made a fool of himself.” Hélène Buzzetti of Le Devoir said the Privy Council clerk managed to “cancel out” some of the strides Butts had made in defending the prime minister.
“Where’s the corruption here?” asked La Presse Thursday morning, in a column by Yves Boisvert. On the basis of Drouin’s testimony about the functioning of the Justice Department, he concluded the rule of law in this country remains healthy. He suggested that Butts could be coming from a genuine place in his concern for Snc-lavalin employees and that so could Wilson-raybould in her hyper-awareness of the invisible line into political interference that the prime minister’s office should not cross. They’re not “mutually exclusive” accounts, he said.
At the end of the day nobody was being asked to do anything illegal, Boisvert noted, and not all political staff would share the sensibilities of constitutional lawyers. The decision whether or not to pursue a remediation agreement for Snc-lavalin was a political choice. “In any case it was not corruption, it was the suggestion to apply a solution provided for in the law,” he wrote.
Pundits haven’ t failed to acknowledge the prime minister’s fall from grace, however. A Journal column titled “Trudeau: And God became man” begins with the supposition that if everybody keeps telling you can walk on water, you’ ll probably start to believe it. Richard Martineau put it this way: “He thought he was indestructible, now he realizes he’s only a human being like the others. Goodbye Superman, hello Clark Kent.”
WHERE’S THE CORRUPTION HERE?
In L e De voir, Miguel Ouellette took issue with Trudeau’s economic argument, writing that the idea Snc-lavalin’s conviction would result in 9,000 net job losses is “protectionist and economically twisted,” since demand for the services the company provides wouldn’t decrease and other companies could sweep in for the opportunity to profit. “The state should not protect the wallets of top business executives this way while undermining the credibility of our institutions,” he argued.
Going overboard to protect Quebec interests has backfired for politicians in the past. In the Montreal Gazette, Martin Patriquin wrote in English that the situation smells of the stereotype Liberals are “unscrupulous, over-privileged and underhanded,” willing to engage in flat-out corruption to protect la belle province.
The last time a Liberal government managed to evoke that image with the sponsorship scandal, he recalled, it obliterated their electoral prospects in the province for a decade.