What will the SNC scandal cost us?

The SNC Lavalin affair involves all sorts of important principles, which this newspaper’s columnists have dissected in detail over the last month. If, as maybe befits an economist, I could be more crass, what do you suppose it’s all going to cost us? The one thing we know is it won’t be nothing.

The decision not to give the company the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) it lobbied so long and hard for — to the extent of actually getting the law changed to allow for such a thing — means the federal government gave up the chance to quickly collect a nice, fat fine. It would have had to be big, at least as big as the bribes alleged, and bigger now after all the fuss. What would be big enough? A quarter-billion dollars? A half billion? A full billion maybe? It’s a little like the problem U.S. policy-makers faced in 2008: How big a bailout package would impress financial markets? What’s both fair and seemly — bigger than a knucklerapping or wrist-slapping but not as damaging as a gutpunch or throat-slash — isn’t actually easy to say, which is why a judge should probably decide.

The downside of a DPA is that the more we move to a system of cash deals and bespoke non-pleas, the more room there is for government discretion, which con- servatives are always leery of. Over the last few years many U.S. firms have agreed to make multi-billion payments rather than submit to lengthy and expensive adjudication. Whether true justice results is open to doubt.

Regarding adjudication, a DPA would also save both the government and the company the costs of a trial. A lot of the costs in the SNCLavalin case are already sunk, since the charges were brought in 2015. That doesn’t mean big costs aren’t still to come for both sides. I hope those deciding against a DPA had empathy with taxpayers and not just needy lawyers. Justice is obviously important and only a court delivers definitive justice. But, as the millions keep adding up, is justice in a bribery case truly priceless?

As to the cost of the political scandal, there are obvious impacts on the reputations and fates of the various players and parties. But what about dollar costs? In his press conference last week, the prime minister said that to learn from the experience and do better in future he would be consulting with “outside experts.”

You wonder which experts he has in mind. Others who have been involved in big political screw-ups? Will he invite Bill Clinton in to chat about his impeachment and what the meaning of the word “is” really was? Will Tony Blair drop by to discuss how he might have creatively sidestepped the Iraq War? Will his old friend Jean Chrétien give him a private seminar on the finer points of the Sponsorship Scandal?

Or will the re-education have to be more widespread? The PM hinted the real problems are — in that allpurpose 21st-century slur — “systemic.” Thus he would take outside advice on “the operating policies and practices across cabinet, the public service and political staff as they relate specifically to judicial matters but also more general (sic).”

That dripping you hear is the sound of consultants salivating. How typical of our era of disseminated responsibility! Someone in an organization screws up in a ridiculously obvious and avoidable way and as a result everybody else in the or- ganization must go through re-education of one kind or another. In this case, it presumably will be training in how better to hear what subordinates are saying. After the expenditure of a few million dollars in consultancy fees the PM will have tangible evidence — receipts even — that his government has addressed its listening problem.

The outside consulting will also extend to the relationship between the minister of justice, the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions. Until January we had a “MOJAG” (minister of justice/attorney general) who apparently understood that relationship perfectly: MOJAG stays out of prosecutorial discretion unless she feels it necessary to provide a written override. Yet because the prime minister ’s people didn’ t understand that, as part of his face-saving the country will be put through an official reconsideration of that relationship — supposing the Liberals are re-elected, at least.

Speaking of which, I was surprised Conservative Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer didn’t respond to the prime minister’s musings about management style by saying the easiest way to be sure we had a PM who listened to his cabinet ministers and stayed out of prosecutorial decisions was to elect him, since he wouldn’t need almost four years in office to master such basic skills.