‘THOSE WERE VEILED THREATS’
IN STUNNING TESTIMONY, WILSON-RAYBOULD ACCUSES TRUDEAU, SENIOR ADVISERS OF INTERFERENCE ON SNC-LAVALIN FILE
Former justice minister Jody Wilson-raybould accused the prime minister and senior advisers of attempting to politically interfere in the criminal prosecution of Snc-lavalin.
WHERE THEY BECAME VERY CLEARLY INAPPROPRIATE WAS WHEN POLITICAL ISSUES CAME UP... LIKE LOSING THE ELECTION IF SNC WERE TO MOVE ...
• In a stunning appearance before the House of Commons justice committee Wednesday, former justice minister Jody Wilson-raybould accused the entire senior ranks of the federal government of making ‘veiled threats’ against her while attempting to interfere politically in the criminal prosecution of Snc-lavalin.
Sitting alone at a table in a packed basement room in Parliament’s West Block, Wilson-raybould told the committee’s MPS that over a fourmonth period in late 2018 she was pressured by Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his staff, clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, senior aides in the Prime Minister’s Office including former principal secretary Gerald Butts and chief of staff Katie Telford, and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself — all of whom were eager for her to direct federal prosecutors to defer the prosecution of Snc-lavalin on corruption and fraud charges and negotiate a remediation agreement instead.
“For a period of approximately four months between September and December of 2018 I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people in the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” Wilson-raybould said.
Wilson-raybould said partisan concerns were repeatedly raised in connection with the Snclavalin case, including by Trudeau, who she claims pointed out to her in a September conversation that he was himself a Quebec MP and raised the political consequences of prosecuting a large Montreal-based company during the then-ongoing Quebec election.
A corruption conviction for Snc-lavalin, a massive Montreal-based engineering company, would mean the company is barred from bidding on federal procurement contracts for ten years. Remediation agreements see a company admit wrongdoing, pay a fine, and obey other compliance conditions, but avoid a guilty conviction in court.
She said the conversations were “clearly inappropriate” and included the suggestion that “a collision with the prime minister on these matters should be avoided.” She said one conversation with Wernick on Dec. 19, 2018, had her thinking of the Saturday Night Massacre, a reference to U.S. president Richard Nixon’s firing of the independent prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.
Indeed, in a cabinet shuffle the following month, Trudeau moved Wilson-raybould from her role as attorney general and justice minister to Veterans Affairs, a move she thought may have resulted from her refusal to comply with the prime minister’s wishes on the Snc-lavalin case. However, she said, the PMO denied that this was the reason she was moved to a different cabinet portfolio.
Wilson-raybould said it was not wrong for senior officials to raise concerns about job losses in the “early stages” of the decision, but once the decision was made, they crossed the line.
“Leaving aside job losses … where they became very clearly inappropriate was when political issues came up like the election in Quebec, like losing the election if SNC were to move their headquarters, conversations like that,” Wilson-raybould said.
“Conversations like the one I had with the clerk of the Privy Council who invoked the prime minister’s name throughout the entirety of the conversation, spoke to me about the prime minister being dug in, spoke to me about his concerns as to what would happen. In my mind those were veiled threats and I took them as such. That is entirely inappropriate.”
I RESIGNED FROM CABINET BECAUSE I DID NOT HAVE CONFIDENCE TO SIT AROUND THE TABLE.
Speaking from Montreal after the committee testimony, Trudeau said he “completely disagrees” with Wilson-raybould’s characterization of events, and said the decision on the Snc-lavalin case was always “hers alone.” Yet he declined to respond to any of the specific allegations Wilson-raybould made about comments from him and his senior staff.
“I strongly maintain, as I have from the beginning, that I and my staff alway acted appropriately and professionally,” he said. “Our government will always focus on jobs and our economy. We of course had discussions about the potential loss of 9,000 jobs in communities across the country, including the possible impact on pensions.”
Asked whether Wilson-raybould should remain in caucus, Trudeau said he had not reviewed her testimony in full yet, and would make decisions on that once he had.
Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, meanwhile, said Trudeau had lost the moral authority to govern and called on him to resign.
“Justin Trudeau simply cannot continue to govern this country now that Canadians know what he has done,” Scheer said. “That is why I am calling on Mr. Trudeau to do the right thing and to resign. Further, the RCMP must immediately open an investigation, if it has not already done so, into the numerous examples of obstruction of justice the former attorney general detailed in her testimony.”
He also called for Wernick’s resignation.
Asked if the RCMP was investigating allegations of political interference in the matter — or planned to investigate — the force’s deputy commissioner Gilles Michaud said “it would be inappropriate to confirm or deny the existence of a criminal investigation.”
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said Wednesday evening that while Trudeau may eventually need to step down, for now his party is calling for a public inquiry to bring out the facts.
“What we need to do is get to the truth, and that’s what a public inquiry will do,” he said. “He may need to resign because of this, but … a public inquiry will get to the bottom, get to the heart of this.”
Wilson-raybould’s testimony included detailed accounts of conversations, telephone calls, emails, and text messages with 11 senior government officials. Those named in her testimony included Trudeau, Telford and Butts, who resigned last week amid controversy over his role in the Snc-lavalin scandal; Morneau and his chief of staff, Ben Chin; and Wernick, the ostensibly nonpartisan head of the federal public service whose testimony before the committee last week some observers criticized for being partisan in tone and content.
After federal prosecutors decided on Sept. 4 against a remediation agreement for Snc-lavalin, it took only two days for Morneau’s chief of staff to contact Wilson-raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. Wilson-raybould said the first time PMO staff contacted her office was Sept. 16, in a phone call with Prince.
On Sept. 17, she had a meeting with Trudeau that she had previously requested on another subject. Wernick was unexpectedly also in attendance. She said Trudeau raised the Snc-lavalin case “immediately.”
“The prime minister asks me to help out, to find a solution here for SNC, citing that if there was no (deferred prosecution) there would be many jobs lost and that SNC will move from Montreal,” she said. She said she told him she had made up her mind, and was not going to interfere with the decision of federal prosecutors.
She said the discussion continued, with Wernick making the argument that the company could leave Canada if the prosecution continued.
“At that point (Trudeau) jumped in, stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that ‘I am an MP in Quebec — the member for Papineau,” Wilson-raybould said. “I was quite taken aback. My response, and I vividly remember this as well, was to ask (Trudeau) a direct question while looking him in the eye. I asked: ‘Are you politically interfering with my role, my decision as the attorney general? I would strongly advise against it.’ The prime minister said ‘No, no, no – we just need to find a solution.’”
There would be many more meetings and phone calls with Morneau, his staff and PMO staff. She met with Butts on Dec. 5, and she said she told him “how I needed everyone to stop talking to me about SNC as I had made up my mind and the engagements were inappropriate.”
“Gerry then took over the conversation and said how we need a solution on the SNC stuff,” she said. She alleges he told her that the Director of Public Prosecutions Act, which separated the prosecution service from the justice department, “was a statute passed by (former Prime Minister Stephen) Harper,” and that he “does not like the law.”
The two final meetings came on Dec. 18 and Dec. 19. The first one had Butts and Telford meeting with Prince and pushing her to find a solution.
Wilson-raybould read out text messages that Prince sent her after the meeting, including the allegation that Butts had said: “Jess, there is no solution here that doesn’t involve some interference.”
The next day, she had a phone call with Wernick. She told him she was starting to have thoughts of the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
On Jan. 7, Trudeau called Wilson-raybould to inform her she would be removed as justice minister and attorney general.
“I will not go into details of this call, or subsequent communications about the shuffle, but I will say that I stated I believed the reason was because of the SNC matter,” she said. “They denied this to be the case.”
Following her opening statement, Wilson-raybould took six rounds of questions from Liberal, Conservative and NDP MPS. The Liberals focused many of their questions on why she didn’t immediately resign, and why she stayed in cabinet after she was shuffled to Veterans Affairs in January (she subsequently resigned after the Snc-lavalin story hit the media).
“I decided that I would take the prime minister at this word, I trusted him, I had confidence in him, and so I decided to continue on around the cabinet table with the concerns that I had around SNC,” she said.
“Do you have confidence in the prime minister today?” asked Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault.
Wilson-raybould paused for a long time before answering. “I’ll say this ... I resigned from cabinet because I did not have confidence to sit around the table, the cabinet table,” she said. “That’s why I resigned.”
Later, she was asked again by Liberal MP Jennifer O’connell if she had confidence in Trudeau. Said Wilson-raybould, “I’m not sure how that question is relevant.”