SNC-Lavalin story is made out of air
“Liberal Party scandals are always so complicated. Conservatives’ scandals are like ‘we used orphans to build napalm to dump on Algonquin Park’ but every Liberal scandal is like ‘to understand the depth of wrongdoing, first understand the role of the Deputy Minister of Fisheries.’ ”
So said @matttomic on social media, expressing the deflated expectations of Canadians hoping for a hot political story — Canada became a division of Lockheed Martin in 2011 and no one noticed! Misogynist Jason Kenney’s real name is Janice! — to give them a break from the Trump news onslaught that began in 2016 and is eating their ears.
The SNC-Lavalin matter already sounded like puff pastry when it first appeared and now it is a crumb, a particle. The allegation was that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his staff were concerned less about legal niceties than about huge job losses should SNCLavalin be prosecuted over dodgy money in Libya — is there any other kind? — and perhaps lose 10 years of federal contracts.
Out of concern for the public good, they may have mentioned this to the justice minister/attorney-general, who can decide, if she chooses, to defer corporate prosecutions. This whole matter is down to whether they talked to her forcefully or gently. Did they hint or did they hammer?
Who knows? More importantly, who cares?
It’s the PMO’s job to do what is best for Canada, especially since Jody Wilson-Raybould appears to have previously messed up. She should have foreseen the catastrophe of grovelling to the Americans by arresting Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in B.C. to help them pressure China. She did not. So it was even more important for her to consult the PMO.
This is not a scandal. It is not even an anecdote. It is the Ottawa equivalent of the Daily Mail’s claim of a national backlash against Meghan’s New York baby shower. It does not exist. Which brings me to the man who explained why it didn’t exist. He is Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick, Canada’s top civil servant, who owned the room at the justice committee. He spoke without hesitancy, with clarity and candour, about a danger sensed by many Canadians.
“I worry about my country right now, I’m deeply concerned about my country right now and its politics and where it’s headed.
I worry about foreign interference in the upcoming election and we’re working hard on that. I worry about the rising tide of incitements to violence, when people use terms like ‘treason’ and ‘traitor’ in open discourse. Those are the words that lead to assassination. I’m worried that someone is going to be shot in this country this year during the political campaign.”
I too have worried about Trudeau’s town halls being a danger to him. I’d worry about Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s if he had any. Scheer always looks like a man who has just put eyedrops in and is in that blinking transitory state. Pleasant enough, he is easily led into traps laid by the extreme far-right. Why else would he have appeared with the racist yellow vests on Parliament Hill?
Wernick, who has served under many prime ministers, abhorred yellow-veststyle remarks by a Saskatchewan senator that would “incite people to drive trucks over people, after what happened in Toronto last summer” simply because they were Liberal. “I worry about the trolling from the vomitorium of social media entering the open media arena,” he said. We do too.
Wernick said he most worries about Canadians “losing faith in the institutions of governance in this country” and doubting that Canada is still, as Chrystia Freeland has put it, a rule-oflaw country. He then crisply explained the SNC-Lavalin matter.
The rule of law is safe, he concluded. The discussions were appropriate and ethical. There is no two-tiered justice. Deferred prosecution agreements can be rationally applied. In other words, there is no there there.
I agree. The SNC-Lavalin matter was a media creation in an election year, possibly done inadvertently to gin things up.
It became a sly collective patchwork of insinuation.
And now that Wernick has explained the complex role of the Deputy Minister of Fisheries, we Canadians can see that it just doesn’t hold up.