In our system, truth doesn’t always come out

By the time Jody Wilson-raybould testifies before the Commons justice committee again — if she ever does — it will have been almost a month since her first appearance.

Already her detailed, documented account — of an intense, sustained and coordinated campaign among a number of senior government officials to pressure her into shutting down the prosecution of a company friendly to the Liberal party in a province the party needs to win in October — has begun to fade from memory.

In the interim, she has been publicly assailed by the prime minister and his men — his former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick — as a liar, incompetent and worse, albeit filtered through such soothing vacuities as “I’m not going to call anyone names” and “people experience situations differently.” The party’s off-the-record briefers and online shock-troops have not been so squeamish.

So Wednesday’s raw power play by the committee’s Liberal majority, voting to adjourn, minutes into a special meeting, rather than take up an opposition motion to recall Wilson-raybould forthwith, had a clear rationale.

Sure, it looks bad, on the day: if this is a government that has nothing to hide, it seems strangely determined to hide it. But for now the government can claim it is not obstructing her testimony, just delaying it. The decision on whether to recall Wilson-raybould, or any of the other officials she has named as having been part of the pressure campaign, has been left to a closed-door meeting of the committee set for next Tuesday.

Tuesday, Tuesday … what else is happening on Tuesday? Ah, yes, the budget. Either way, then, whether she is allowed to testify or not, it will be drowned in the flood of news coverage that inevitably follows any federal budget, let alone the last before an election.

And with every week that passes, the government is betting, the greater the chance of the public getting bored, on the media getting distracted, and the opposition getting nervous. I would not necessarily bet that they are wrong.

There is more than one way to stonewall, after all. It doesn’t have to involve firing special prosecutors or shuttering committee hearings. It can be done more subtly: first by dissembling, sowing confusion by means of a series of blurred distinctions, irrelevant objections and non-denial denials until a more-orless coherent cover story can be agreed upon; then by more deliberate stalling tactics, giving the media as few news hooks as possible and creating enough diversions that the public’s attention eventually wanes and wanders. In Watergate, it was called a “modified, limited hangout.”

Best of all, there’s not much anyone can do about it. In our system, the prime minister decides whether the prime minister should be held to account. Virtually all of the mechanisms by which he might theoretically be required to answer to credible charges of serious wrongdoing — and meddling with a prosecution is about as serious as it gets — are under his control. That certainly includes the committee, whatever pretense of independence might be maintained.

Indeed, the justice committee’s Liberal members had already voted against recalling Wilson-raybould once, even before Wednesday’s shenanigans — as, at the outset, they had voted to restrict their inquiries to a broad survey of remediation agreements and the role of the attorney general in principle, rather than the specific allegations before them. The witness list was accordingly limited, initially, to just three people: the clerk, the current attorney general and the deputy minister.

Even after they finally agreed to allow the former attorney-general to testify, she was limited in what she could say, the prime minister having restricted his waiver of cabinet and solicitor-client confidentiality to the period before Wilson-raybould was shuffled into Veterans Affairs. Butts, who was not called until after he had volunteered to appear — and with the benefit of having heard her testimony — was under no such constraint, while Wernick was permitted to testify both before and after her appearance.

So the fix would appear to be very much in. In a system with more robust checks and balances, stonewalling is a losing strategy: sooner or later, the truth always comes out. In our system? Not so much.

What, after all, is the alternative to the committee? A public inquiry? Not unless the prime minister agrees to call one. A police investigation? If they decide to launch one — and the line separating the Prime Minister’s Office and the commissioner’s has not always been as thick as one would like. Of course, there’s always the dear old ethics commissioner — or would be, had the current commissioner not suddenly taken extended sick leave.

The irony is suffocating. Concentration of power is very much at the root of this scandal: the assumption of the prime minister and his lieutenants that they were entitled, not only to lean on the former attorney general to decide on a criminal prosecution to their liking, but allegedly to reach down deep into her department. And yet the same concentration of power makes it all but impossible to get to the bottom of it.

The public is very much in the same position as Wilson-raybould: told of her complaints of having been improperly pressured by the prime minister, among others, the prime minister replied that she should have brought her concerns to the prime minister. (She did, of course, but never mind.)

Got a complaint about the government’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for investigating itself ? Great: take it up with the government.