Latest on the Liberals’ Snc-lavalin scandal
WILSONRAYBOULD GETS SURPRISE INVITE TO APPEAR BEFORE COMMITTEE
ALiberal MP said that when a parliamentary colleague from any side of the aisle is in trouble, he flips them a note of support. He said he planned to do the same when he saw Jody Wilson-raybould sitting on the government front-benches before question period on Tuesday. “But what would I say? I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
It was another day through the looking glass on Parliament Hill. Last week, Liberal MPS on the justice committee shut down opposition attempts to call the former justice minister as a witness in the Snc-lavalin affair. Now, one of those MPS, Iqra Khalid, has put forward a motion inviting Wilson-raybould to appear.
Last week, Wilson-raybould quit cabinet. On Tuesday, she walked out of the cabinet room and took her place in the seat still assigned to the veteran’s affairs minister in the House of Commons seating plan.
Ambitious backbenchers like Khalid do not immolate their own careers, so there had to be a degree of comfort among the now-depleted ranks in the Prime Minister’s Office that Wilson-raybould is not going to make incendiary allegations if and when she appears at committee.
It emerged that the former justice minister had asked to speak to cabinet earlier in the day, leading to suspicions among the more cynical that a deal had been struck — Wilson-raybould’s re-entry to cabinet and the head of Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerry Butts, in return for her going easy with the damaging accusations.
But people who know her better than I do suggest that is not how Wilson-raybould operates. She has not returned to cabinet and asked everyone to forget that she resigned in the first place.
Rather, she is said to be declaratory by nature and wanted to air her grievances with the cabinet.
Yet, whatever Trudeau heard, it can’t have been too bad or he would not have sanctioned the witness invitation to the justice committee.
Speaking with journalists, Wilson-raybould said she is still consulting with legal council on what she can say without broaching solicitor-client privilege rules. That seems to me to be a red herring — if there is a suggestion that Butts (or anyone else) pressured her to make a decision, there would be no privilege extended to him and she could talk freely.
Yet she said on Tuesday she remains a Liberal. “I was elected as a Liberal MP and will continue to serve as such,” she said.
Wilson-raybould strikes me as someone who would like to get things done, and not much can be achieved when you’re sitting so far from the action in the House of Commons, you’re almost in the translation box.
If the Liberals make it back into power, she will want to be in cabinet and it is conceivable that the speech to her former colleagues was the first step in a rapprochement.
The date for her committee appearance has not yet been set but it is the appropriate venue to investigate who said what, when and to whom. The NDP had sponsored a motion in the House calling for a public inquiry, supported by the Conservatives. Lisa Raitt, the party’s deputy leader, called for the 40 lawyers in the Liberal caucus to back the motion, based on the oath they took as solicitors to “champion the rule of law.” “Shine the light on what is possibly a criminal matter and do it today,” she said.
But this is a scandal that looks increasingly unworthy of the “-gate” suffix and a parliamentary committee is the appropriate venue.
As Conservative Michael Chong pointed out, committees have all the powers of a court to compel witnesses, exploding the contention by a Liberal justice committee chair, Anthony Housefather, last week that a parliamentary committee was not the right place to investigate the SNC case.
As Chong said, in 2007, the ethics committee compelled lobbyist and arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber to tell his story, summoning him from a Toronto jail.
Committees have turned into gong shows, notably the public works committee into the sponsorship scandal in 2004.
But this case promises to be far less complicated. Wilson-raybould will say her piece — and the Liberals appear to have already concluded they can live with that testimony. Then Gerald Butts, having resigned from the PMO, will be free to defend his reputation.
Unless those two accounts are glaringly at odds, that may well be the end of the matter and we are all going to wonder whether it was worth paralyzing the government of Canada for much of the past month.
In Britain, they are in the midst of a constitutional crisis that has required the health minister to stockpile vaccines and body-bags, in case of a nodeal Brexit.
The most serious political impasse this Liberal government has had to face may all come down to a difference of interpretation between a male political staffer and a female cabinet minister over what constitutes “undue pressure.”