SELLEY ON WILSON-RAYBOULD.
‘It is wrong’, said Wilson-Raybould, still they persisted
Unless you thought either Jody Wilson-Raybould or Michael Wernick were lying through their teeth before the justice committee, there is nothing in the tape of their Dec. 19 conversation that dramatically changes the landscape in the SNCLavalin affair.
We hear a dug-in attorney general insisting that the pressure being brought to bear on her to intervene with an eye to securing Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement is completely inappropriate. She mentions in particular a meeting the day before between her chief of staff, Jessica Prince, and PMO head honchos Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, in which (per Prince’s notes) Butts said “there is no solution here that does not involve some interference,” and Telford said “we don’t want to debate legalities anymore.” She also mentions the very telephone call in question: “It is wrong,” she tells Wernick.
And we hear a clerk of the Privy Council who sounds genuinely professionally alarmed at the “collision” that he warns Wilson-Raybould is about to occur between her and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if she sticks to her guns. He sounds flummoxed as to why he can’t break the impasse.
“People are talking past each other,” Wernick twice insists, which seems to be true: the PMO was talking about potential job losses and (per Wernick on the tape) a “signature firm” like Lavalin leaving Quebec so soon “after the Oshawa thing and what’s going on in Calgary.” The PMO just wanted Wilson-Raybould to use everything in her “legal toolbox” to see what could be done for poor Lavalin. Wilson-Raybould, meanwhile, was talking about the basic principle of prosecutorial independence. The PMO seemed not to understand how pressuring her to open her legal toolbox could possibly pose a threat to that.
Most striking is Wilson-Raybould’s insistence that her advice would actually protect the prime minister. She grants she could intercede with the director of public prosecutions, who had decided against granting Lavalin the DPA, but that she would have to announce it in the Canada Gazette. And in her view, she says, that would look terrible.
“This goes far beyond
saving jobs,” she tells Wernick. “This is about the integrity of the prime minister. There is no way that anybody would interpret (it) other than (as political) interference, if I was to step in.
“I do not want anybody to misinterpret that I don’t care about those jobs,” she says. “But this is about the integrity of the government.”
She asks Wernick: “Does (Trudeau) understand the gravity of what this potentially could mean? … This is about interfering with one of our fundamental institutions. This is like breaching a constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence.”
“Well I don’t think he sees it as that,” Wernick meekly responds.
“Well then nobody’s explaining that to him, Michael!” she snaps back.
In recent weeks a certain subspecies of Liberal partisan has delighted in portraying Wilson-Raybould as a hapless political naïf. (This is by no means incompatible in the partisan mind with her being a conniving shrew intent on
does (trudeau) understand the gravity of What this ... could mean?
installing herself as prime minister.) But if we take her at her word here, based on what we’ve seen over the past month, it may well be true.
She wouldn’t be alone: A lot of us yokels assumed the sight of a Liberal prime minister and his justice minister mucking around to bail out a well-connected company that funnelled tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign donations to their party last decade, over some flamboyant alleged malfeasance that involved the enrichment of the Gadhafi regime, would be a really awful look.
How wrong we were. Not just Liberal partisans but ostensibly independent commentators and pundits have stood on line to defend such meddling as entirely appropriate, to demand Wilson-Raybould be banished from the Liberal caucus for her impudence, to grab hold of any alleged imperfection in her character to impugn her entire testimony, to suggest we turn a blind eye because much more terrible things are going on in other countries.
It has been a mortifying display. In a rational universe, what Wilson-Raybould revealed would lead to demands for wholesale change. Instead it seems to be further entrenching the status quo, and the demands are mostly for her to go away. That she hasn’t, against all good sense and reason, is to her credit.