Ex-AG releases secret tape of call with Wernick
CALL BETWEEN CLERK, WILSON-RAYBOULD SHOWS TRUDEAU WAS ‘DETERMINED’ TO BYPASS LEGAL DECISION
Atrove of documents detailing Jody Wilson-Raybould’s final days as justice minister and attorney general — including a secretly recorded phone call with then-Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick — has reinforced her claim that government officials attempted to interfere in the prosecution of SNCLavalin and undermined the accounts of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and some of his top aides. The evidence, submitted to the House of Commons justice committee Tuesday and made public Friday, shows that Wilson-Raybould repeatedly warned top officials working for Trudeau that they were attempting to politically interfere in a criminal prosecution, violating a constitutional principle. In an extraordinary 17-minute phone call on Dec. 19, 2018, Wernick can be heard telling Wilson-Raybould that Trudeau was “determined” to find a way for Montreal-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin to get a deferred prosecution, despite Wilson-Raybould’s insistence that it was wrong to overrule the prosecution service’s decision to proceed with a trial. If convicted, the company would be barred from bidding on federal contracts for 10 years.
“This is not a great place for me to be in,” Wilson-Raybould tells Wernick near the end of the phone call. “But what I am confident of is that I have given the prime minister my best advice to protect him and to protect the constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence.” “All right, but ... I am worried about a collision then because he is pretty firm about this,” Wernick replies, referring to Trudeau. “I just saw him a few hours ago and this is really important to him.” Ending the phone call, Wilson-Raybould tells Wernick she is waiting for “the other shoe to drop.” “I am not under any illusion how the prime minister has and gets things that he wants,” she said. Less than three weeks later, Wilson-Raybould was told she would be shuffled into a different cabinet role. The prime minister has repeatedly denied that it was over the SNC-Lavalin issue. Wilson-Raybould’s evidence also includes lengthy text-message exchanges between herself and her chief of staff, Jessica Prince. In one conversation, Prince details a conversation she had on Dec. 18, 2018, with Trudeau’s top aides, chief of staff Katie Telford and then-principal secretary Gerald Butts. Prince said that Telford and Butts were adamant that SNC-Lavalin get a deferred prosecution, and that Butts in particular didn’t care about respecting the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, given it had been created as an independent agency under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. “Gerry kept talking about how it was created by Harper,” Prince said in a text message. “I was like ‘sure but it is what we have and we have to respect the statute.’ No scruples.” “So crazy,” responded Wilson-Raybould. “Gerry said the same thing to me.” The new documents show that Wilson-Raybould repeatedly said that she felt the pressure was inappropriate and constituted an attempt at political interference — despite the fact that Trudeau, Butts and Wernick have all contended that she did not express concern at the time.
“If anyone, particularly the attorney general, felt that we were not doing our job fully, responsibly and according to all the rules, as a government, it was her responsibility to come forward to me this past fall and highlight that directly to me,” said Trudeau on Feb. 12, 2018. “She did not. Nobody did.” After the material was released, Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer repeated his call for Trudeau’s resignation. “(Trudeau) looked Canadians in the eye and told them that no one had raised concerns with him,” he said in a statement. “This is false and he owes Canadians an explanation. The entire SNC-Lavalin scandal is corruption on top of corruption on top of corruption. “The prime minister has lost the moral authority to govern and must resign.” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called the material “so compelling and well-documented that we must have an independent public inquiry to get to the truth.” Wilson-Raybould submitted the material after Liberal MPs on the Commons justice committee voted to conclude its study of the issue without inviting her to testify a second time — despite the fact they had invited Wernick twice. She testified before the committee on Feb. 27, a four-hour-long appearance in which she described the Dec. 19 phone call with Wernick. She said she felt he was making “veiled threats.” Wernick testified to the committee on Feb. 21 and again on March 6. In his second appearance, Wernick disputed Wilson-Raybould’s version of the phone call. “That is not my recollection of the conversation,” he said when asked to respond to her description. But he said he didn’t take notes about it and didn’t have a strong memory of what was said. “I do not have an independent recollection of the event. I did not wear a wire, record the conversation or take extemporaneous notes,” he said. In her Feb. 27 appearance, Wilson-Raybould had not told the committee she’d recorded the call. In her submission Friday, in which she provided both the transcript and the audio, she said she made the recording because she didn’t have a staff member with her to take notes, and because she “had reason to believe that it was likely to be an inappropriate conversation.” In the call, Wernick said Trudeau was concerned about potential job losses and wanted “to be able to say that he has tried everything he can, you know, within a legitimate toolbox, to try to head that off.” The Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement Friday night saying the prime minister was not briefed by the clerk on his conversation with Wilson-Raybould, and “we were unaware of the full contents of this recording before today.”