SNC-Lavalin a textbook case of centralized power

A significant part of the back story in the widening controversy over SNC-Lavalin and former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould isn’t receiving the attention it deserves. It is the Prime Minister’s Office itself, most often referred to as the PMO.

It’s not sexy. It doesn’t have the titillation value of waiting to hear what Wilson-Raybould says when she eventually decides to break her near silence.

By comparison, the PMO part of the story is boring. But we should pay attention. It may well be that the PMO, which has been referred to as a secretive palace guard, plays a key role in this unfolding scandal.

Even if it turns out that no one from the PMO did anything inappropriate to “pressure” Wilson-Raybould concerning the SNC-Lavalin case, the nature of that office and its enormous power deserves scrutiny and reform. Just don’t expect Justin Trudeau, or for that matter Andrew Scheer, to be the authors of that change.

How powerful is the PMO? Consider this. Gerald Butts, who resigned on the weekend in response to the scandal — while denying having done or overseen anything inappropriate — was among the most powerful people in Ottawa. He, and the rest of the PMO staff, are not public servants. They’re political appointees who play a key role co-ordinating public policy in the public interest. But because they’re political appointees, they can also legitimately foster the partisan interests of the PM and his party.

These jobs, including Butts as principle secretary, don’t have public job descriptions. Nor do they have public mandate letters, unlike government ministers whose mandate letters are public and available for scrutiny. What they do have is power, and lots of it. The sort of power where they meet, negotiate, wheel and deal all the time, both to promote the government’s policies and also its political interest.

Consider: In the two or so years leading up to this scandal, representatives from SNC-Lavalin met with PMO staff literally dozens of times. And not about the company’s business, which is engineering. The visits are characterized in documents as to discuss legal business. What are the odds that this legal business was different than Lavalin’s well-documented legal woes, which are on the way to ending up as criminal charges? What possible justification exists for the company’s front people to meet with PMO staff up to 20 times?

We don’t know, and probably never will. Because the PMO operates behind a veil of secrecy. PMO staff aren’t responsible to anyone other than the prime minister. That makes them the most powerful, unaccountable group in Canadian politics and public life.

We are not suggesting the PMO is always involved in nefarious business. But with its wide-open mandate and lack of transparency, the potential certainly exists.

So much so that before he became prime minister, Justin Trudeau publicly proclaimed he was going to fix the problem.

In an interview with the CBC in 2015, he said: “One of the things that we’ve seen throughout the past decades in government is the trend toward more control from the Prime Minister’s Office. Actually, it can be traced as far back as my father, who kicked it off in the first place.”

He continued: “I think I actually quite like the symmetry of me being the one who’d end that. My father had a particular way of doing things; I have a different way, and his was suited to his time and mine is suited to my time ... I think we get better public policy when we’re done, when it’s done openly and transparently.” Well, that hasn’t happened, at least not yet.

And look where Trudeau now finds himself.

Now that’s what we call symmetry.