Trudeau may not be sorry, but he’s sure in a sorry state

Justin Trudeau wears apologia like a rose in his lapel.

Sometimes accessorized with tears.

The prime minister has either apologized or promised to apologize for: the harm caused to Aboriginal people by Canada’s residential schools policy and the decades-long abuse of Indigenous children; the Chinese head tax; refusal to let the Komagata Maru, a steamship carrying passengers from British India attempting to emigrate here, dock in Vancouver in 1914; turning away Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe in 1939; and mistreatment of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.

(As a non-hyphenated Canadian of Italian descent, I want no part of an apology.)

Historical injustices that have nothing to do with either Trudeau’s Liberal party, as it exists today, or Canada as it exists today.

When it comes to his own conduct, Trudeau has not been quite so exactingly virtuous. The B.C. reporter who complained that a 28-year-old Trudeau had groped her at a charity fundraiser in 2000, well, she was remembering the incident differently. Eighteen years later, he couldn’t recall “any negative interactions that day at all.” Adding, when questioned by reporters, “I do not feel like I acted inappropriately in any way. But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently. This is part of the reflections we have to go through.”

In fact, the “incident” was a fart in a mitten, seized upon by Trudeau’s critics as evidence of hypocrisy by a prime minister who pumps his feminist bona fides — this was at the height of the #MeToo movement — but cut himself a whole lot of slack for bygone behaviour. Truthfully, it’s highly unfair to judge conduct from the ancient past by contemporary standards. Except Trudeau has cleaved to his defining sanctimony when adducing the alleged sexual misconduct of others, including his own MPs.

Trudeau’s virtue and kneejerk penitence apparently have no bounds. Oh wait. Yes it does. No apology forthcoming, Trudeau declared this week, after release of a scathing report from the federal ethics watchdog that concluded, in no uncertain terms, that Trudeau broke the law when he repeatedly applied inappropriate pressure on then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to prevent the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

“I’m not going to apologize for standing up for Canadians’ jobs, because that’s my job — to make sure Canadians and communities and pensioners and families across the country are supported, and that’s what I will always do,” Trudeau said on Thursday in Fredericton. Uh, no. Doesn’t wash. As Trudeau reminded Wilson-Raybould at least twice, he was a Quebec MP and the Liberals needed to retain its Quebec seats to stay in power. Ergo, don’t go messing with SNC-Lavalin, thereby potentially triggering electorate disgruntlement over lost jobs.

Ditto the credibility jangle of Trudeau professing to accept Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion’s report and taking “full responsibility” while — threecard Monte here — disagreeing with its conclusions. That’s illogical, disingenuous and frankly mendacious.

Second time ’round that Trudeau has been found to have personally broken the ethics law, which carries no punitive sanctions. This time, a violation of a section of the Conflict of Interest Act that expressly forbids the prime minister from using his position to influence a decision in ways that would improperly advance “another person’s private interests” — to wit, SNC-Lavalin. As both Trudeau and members of the Prime Minister’s Office indisputably did, said Dion — at least 10 of his ministers and the clerk of the Privy Council, on 22 documented occasions, putting the squeeze on Wilson-Raybould to cut a sweetheart deal by overruling her own director of public prosecutions’ decision that SNC-Lavalin did not qualify for a deferred prosecution agreement. Remediation — basically, relief from criminal prosecution, a separate system of justice, or injustice, not available to poor schmucks who don’t have inside access to the old boys’ club surrounding the prime minister. An amendment made to the Criminal Code, that deferred cop-out, by Finance Minister Bill Morneau a month before he presented his 2018 budget. The same Morneau who never called for an audit of SNCLavalin to determine how many jobs might actually disappear should the company be found liable for its failed — stinky — corporate and business strategies, job losses that were grossly exaggerated by SNC-Lavalin’s cosy political allies and which, in any event, would likely be replaced by whichever companies stepped into the breach to fulfil those contracts.

“SNC: Thanks for Nothing, DPPSC (Director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada)” was the title of a document the company sent the PMO last Oct. 11, one day after SNC-Lavalin publicly disclosed that its bid for deferred prosecution agreement had been turned down. The “research paper” also noted that the company’s shares had fallen 14 per cent in that 24-hour period.

Clearly a matter of SNCLavalin’s private business interests, not the public’s interest.

That document was uncovered by Dion. And who knows what else transpired among Trudeau and his sock puppets, because the ethics commissioner was blocked by the Privy Council Office from access to crucial documents, and prevented from questioning at least nine witnesses, on the dubious grounds of cabinet confidentiality.

Trudeau claims to have accepted the ethics commissioner’s findings — “tantamount to political direction,” Dion wrote, simultaneously dismissing Trudeau’s justification that he’d acted to ensure the “public interest,” primarily the potential loss of some 9,000 jobs if the gigantic engineering and construction firm were to be found guilty on charges of corruption and fraud.

But he hasn’t objectively done so, instead sticking steadfast to his no-apology bullet.

Amid all this resurrected scandal, what’s often forgotten is what SNC-Lavalin stands accused of doing: That, during the long dictatorship of Libyan tyrant Moammar Gadhafi, the Montreal-based corporation, in pursuit of a half-billion contract to build an airport in Benghazi and a $275-million deal to construct a prison in Gharyan, allegedly funnelled upward of $160 million in kickbacks to Gadhafi’s son, Saadi, much of which financed the younger Gadhafi’s debauched lifestyle — a superyacht, prostitutes, porn films, nude dancers, a private jet for his travels to Canada and redecorating his penthouse suite in Toronto, according to an RCMP information to obtain a search warrant of SNC-Lavalin’s headquarters.

The cost of doing business, apparently, with a rogue and spectacularly corrupt regime.

One further footnote, scarcely mentioned: This all allegedly occurred over a period of 16 years — until the Gadhafi regime was toppled, in no small part, by NATO military intervention in 2011. Operation Unified Protector was led by a Canadian commander, Lt.Gen. Charles Bouchard.

A Canadian soldier directing a military campaign against a regime allegedly enriched by a Canadian corporation.

That wasn’t on Trudeau’s watch. But he owns the tawdry legacy of trying to buffer that corporation — even if he won’t own up to it.