Liberal response has been inadequate. Canadians deserve the full truth.
The Trudeau government must have known it was going to be bad, given everything Jody Wilson-Raybould has said and not said over the past three weeks.
But this was surely worse, much worse, than even the government had expected.
In her appearance before the House of Commons justice committee, Wilson-Raybould laid out a detailed and damning account of how she and her staff were subjected to what she called a “consistent and sustained effort” to persuade her to interfere in a judicial decision for straight-up party political reasons.
Not just because a lot of jobs were at stake if engineering giant SNC-Lavalin had to endure a damaging trial on corruption charges. No, according to her, it was because top Liberals, including and indeed especially the prime minister, feared the party’s electoral chances in Quebec would suffer if a big company packed up and moved its head office out of the province.
The Liberals on the committee seemed as shell-shocked by the former attorney general’s account as everyone else. They were unable to find a line of questioning that adds up to a coherent counter-narrative, one that would put the events in a more sympathetic light for the government.
At this point, the Liberals need to stop hoping, as they apparently have been doing since the story broke three weeks ago, that this affair will just fade away, that the public will get bored with arcane legal details about deferred prosecution agreements and the like.
That won’t happen. Wilson-Raybould provided enough fodder for the opposition, the justice committee and the media to chew on for some time to come. To begin with, there will be pressure to hear from others deeply involved in the saga, starting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and his chief of staff, Katie Telford. They must be called to give their versions of what happened.
The committee should also recall the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, who strongly argued last week that there was nothing inappropriate in how senior officials, including the prime minister, dealt with the issue.
Wilson-Raybould flatly contradicts Wernick’s version of events and puts him in the room during a crucial meeting she had with Trudeau last Sept. 17 when, according to her version, the prime minister directly raised political considerations for giving SNC-Lavalin a break, at one point reminding her that he is an MP from Quebec and a Quebec election was on the horizon. We need to know who’s telling the truth here.
Most importantly, the Liberals need to develop their own story, as best they can. They need to explain in as much detail as Wilson-Raybould presented why their actions should not be seen as she saw them — as deeply inappropriate interference in the independent role of the attorney general in deciding on whether to pursue a criminal prosecution.
In order to get the full picture, the public needs to hear how the Liberals see all this. Does Wilson-Raybould have key details of her meetings with the PM and senior officials wrong? Did she not properly appreciate the extent of her discretion as AG to allow SNC-Lavalin to avoid a trial? Is there another way of understanding all this that would not be so damning for the government?
Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault took a stab at that by suggesting she should have kept an open mind on the SNCLavalin prosecution, given the stakes involved in possibly damaging a company that employs thousands of Canadians. But the government will have to do a lot better at developing a full response to what Wilson-Raybould laid out.
So far, it has conspicuously failed to do that. It has relied on a series of evolving talking points, none of which are adequate to refute the former minister’s story. We still haven’t heard a fully developed argument from the Liberal side.
Trudeau tried one more time on Wednesday evening, saying he won’t apologize for standing up for saving jobs in Quebec. That simply isn’t going to be enough to rebut the detailed narrative that Wilson-Raybould has presented. This isn’t going to be settled with a campaign-style battle of slogans that avoids the core issue raised by Wilson-Raybould: an attempt to inject nakedly partisan considerations into what should be an arms-length judicial decision.
This has turned into a battle of credibility between WilsonRaybould and the Liberals, with the prime minister at the centre of it all. On that front, the Liberals have a tough job ahead of them. The former minister was a highly credible witness; her story will have to be countered with facts, not slogans, and certainly not with any attempt to discredit Wilson-Raybould. That was tried after the story first broke, and backfired badly.
As the man who appointed her to the position of justice minister and attorney general should well know, WilsonRaybould holds a special kind of power as a woman and an Indigenous leader. “I come from a long line of matriarchs,” she told the justice committee, “and I am a truth teller in accordance with the laws and traditions of our Big House — this is who I am and who I will always be.”
Wilson-Raybould demanded a chance to tell “my truth,” and did that in spades. But Canadians deserve more: they deserve to hear the full truth from all involved in this tangled affair.
The Liberals were unable to find a line of questioning that adds up to a coherent counter-narrative.