THE ABYSS DEEPENS
Two things are true of government. First, the larger it grows, the more opportunities arise for incompetence, incoherence or abuse of power. Second, the weaker the policies it embraces, the more likely the government must resort to delay, secrecy or deceit to support them. The more shovels, the deeper the hole.
There are few better examples than the SNC-Lavalin/Jody Wilson-Raybould affair.
For decades, the government has extended support to a major engineering firm, in the belief that picking economic winners is its job. As the Globe and Mail reports, Export Development Canada offered up at least $2 billion in loans to SNC-Lavalin over two decades, even after it knew that the RCMP was investigating the company. Big government somehow thinks that in addition to, say, bringing clean drinking water to remote communities, an essential part of its business is to help selected private ventures develop overseas markets. Once invested in such notions, it is difficult to step back.
As SNC’s legal troubles deepened, globally and at home, it lobbied politicians for a sort of plea deal called a “deferred prosecution agreement” after it was charged with bribery and corruption over its dealings with Libya. Conviction on the charges would have barred it from Canadian government contracts for a decade.
It may be that such plea deals for corporations have merit, but we’re dubious. The government must have worried too, since, to adopt the measure, it resorted to sleight of hand: It tucked it quietly into the 2018 omnibus budget bill. To summarize: big government fanned money about; then desperately grasped at a salvage policy after the darling of its largesse fell afoul of the rules; then, fearing that this policy might be openly examined, used trickery to pass it.
Into this political abyss tumbled the (then) justice minister, who perhaps found the pleadeal policy less than attractive, and who is now out of cabinet. We don’t actually know if this is why Jody Wilson-Raybould stepped away, because the government won’t remove the legal muzzle on her from her former attorney general role. What we do know is that a whispering campaign has begun over her character; that the prime minister flailed incoherently in explaining her brief tenure in a junior cabinet job; that an MP suggested she was shuffled because she didn’t speak French; that somehow Scott Brison might be to blame, and that the Liberals on a Commons committee shut down an important line of public inquiry into the mess.
The hole simply gets deeper and deeper. Sound governance lies buried.