Former justice minister says her lips are sealed

Claims solicitor-client privilege stops her talking about SNC-Lavalin case

OTTAWA — Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould says she cannot discuss allegations that she was pressured by the Prime Minister’s Office to help SNC-Lavalin avoid a criminal prosecution.

In a statement Friday morning, WilsonRaybould says she is bound by solicitorclient privilege and cannot publicly talk about aspects of the case.

The Globe and Mail reported Thursday that Wilson-Raybould was demoted in a cabinet shuffle early last month because she wouldn’t intervene in the case of SNCLavalin.

The Quebec engineering and construction giant has been charged with bribery and corruption in a bid to secure government business in Libya and wanted a deal, allowed under the law, to pay reparations rather than be prosecuted.

Toronto MP Arif Virani, the parliamentary secretary to the current justice minister David Lametti, answered a question in the House of Commons with the most sweeping denial of the story the government has issued so far.

“Mr. Speaker, at no point has the current minister of justice or the former minister of justice been directed or pressured by the prime minister or the Prime Minister’s Office to make any decision on this or any other matter,” Virani said.

“The attorney general of Canada is the chief law officer of the crown and provides legal advice to the government with the responsibility to act in the public interest. He takes those responsibilities very seriously.”

Asked whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would waive the rule that prevents Wilson-Raybould, as the government’s former top legal adviser, from saying what she did in the job, Virani repeated that the allegations of improper influence are false.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh are calling for an ethics probe into the allegations.

Scheer says Conservatives on the House of Commons justice committee, along with the New Democrats, will also force an emergency meeting to consider a motion calling on nine high-ranking government officials to testify, including Wilson-Raybould herself.

The list includes Lametti, the prime minister’s chief of staff Katie Telford and the prime minister’s principal secretary Gerald Butts.

“If the prime minister has nothing to hide as he has suggested then he should have no reason to fear these individuals appearing before the justice committee,” Scheer said.

The prime minister should have nothing to fear from an independent investigation by the federal ethics commissioner, Singh said separately.

“All this cries out for some serious investigation,” he said.

The Globe reported that PMO aides leaned heavily on Wilson-Raybould to persuade the federal director of public prosecutions to negotiate a “remediation agreement” with SNC-Lavalin as a way of holding it to account for wrongdoing by some of its executives, rather than pursuing a criminal prosecution that could financially hobble the company.

SNC-Lavalin was charged in 2015 by the RCMP and openly called for a remediation agreement to avoid damaging the company, a major employer in Quebec. After lobbying by the company of government officials, including those in the PMO, the government included in its 2018 budget a Criminal Code amendment to allow such agreements to be negotiated in cases of corporate crime, as is done in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Last October, Kathleen Roussel, the director of public prosecutions, informed SNC-Lavalin that negotiating a remediation agreement would be inappropriate in this particular case. Three months later, Wilson-Raybould was moved to the veterans affairs post, a move widely seen as a demotion.

Wilson-Raybould’s father, Bill Wilson, said in a Facebook post Thursday that his daughter’s cabinet demotion “makes sense now — ugly political sense.” He predicted “history will prove that she did the right thing.”