BUSINESS: Bringing narcissism and absolutism together:
If Jody Wilson-Raybould doesn’t bring down Justin Trudeau’s government, it won’t be for lack of trying.
In her recently published memoir, “Indian in the Cabinet,” exquisitely timed for the climactic final days of her former boss’s re-election bid, WilsonRaybould recalls a difficult moment toward the end of her tenure as Trudeau’s justice minister.
She writes that she knew Trudeau wanted her to lie to Canadians about the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in interfering with her ministry’s handling of a looming 2019 criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Ltd., Canada’s largest engineering firm.
Trudeau has disputed Wilson-Raybould’s account of the meeting.
And on the weekend, Wilson-Ray
bould said the RCMP should be provided governmentwithheld documents enabling it to do a more thorough job of probing the Trudeau government’s role in the SNC-Lavalin affair.
The takeaway is that Trudeau and his government are culpable of wrongdoing, an allegation that Wilson-Raybould has stuck with since she quit cabinet in 2019. Trudeau’s campaign rivals have, of course, gleefully exploited WilsonRaybould’s timely gift.
Wilson-Raybould remains an Independent MP, though she is not seeking re-election in her Vancouver Granville riding on Sept. 20.
The SNC-Lavalin affair of 2019 is one of the least understood “scandals” in recent memory. It is a puzzle of conflicting accounts of the same events among the participants.
A powerful company, SNCLavalin, seemingly exerted undue pressure on Ottawa for lenience in its looming trial on charges of allegedly bribing state officials in Libya.
Trudeau’s government caved into that pressure.
It accepted at face value SNCLavalin’s exaggerated threats — and those of the premier of Quebec — that an SNC-Lavalin convicted on those charges and thus banned from federal government contracts would have to lay off its 9,000 Canadian employees. It might also relocate its head office from Montreal to the U.S. or elsewhere.
In fact, a humbled SNCLavalin’s employees would have been snapped up by other firms filling the gap created by SNC. It would likely not be banned from provincial contracts. And Quebec would never allow SNC-Lavalin, a pillar of Quebec Inc., to leave the province.
Trudeau’s ignorance of those facts was dumbfounding.
So was Jody Wilson-Raybould’s stubborn refusal, over a period of about four months, to direct prosecutors to drop the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin in favour of the “deferred prosecution agreement” (DPA) that Trudeau desperately sought.
That contest of wills didn’t end until Trudeau removed Wilson-Raybould from the justice portfolio. Soon after, Wilson-Raybould quit cabinet altogether.
All the chief participants in the saga acted badly. But Wilson-Raybould’s conduct is the least explicable.
Wilson-Raybould became obsessed with refusing to overrule the decision by the head of her ministry’s Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) that SNC did not deserve a DPA.
Wilson-Raybould was, and remains, self-righteous in depicting herself as a lone defender of legal principle, though she has yet to spell out what exactly that principle is.
DPAs are widely used in major economies, including the U.S., the U.K. and much of Europe. Canada added the DPA process to its judicial system in 2018.
A DPA is an out-of-court settlement in which an accused company pays a large fine, cleanses its corporate culture of every last vestige of unethical practices, and submits to a probationary period to ensure it is adhering to the highest standards of corporate governance.
DPAs give prosecutors an additional tool to resolve cases, in an expeditious way that also reduces costs in the judicial system.
As it turned out, SNC-Lavalin quietly reached a negotiated settlement with federal prosecutors in December 2019, with no involvement from the Trudeau government.
SNC-Lavalin pleaded guilty to a single charge of fraud, rather than a potentially more damaging bribery charge. It agreed to pay a sizable $280million fine, roughly equal to the company’s average annual profits over five years. And it submitted to three years of court-monitored probation.
That was after SNC-Lavalin had spent about five years replacing its senior management and directors and instituting a rigorous ethics training program for all employees.
By then, Wilson-Raybould had left the government. And SNC awaits the outcome of remaining investigations of its contracts from the 2000s.
Wilson-Raybould’s actions were and remain quixotic.
She evinced little interest in SNC or DPAs to understand the larger context of her actions.
Not knowing better, Wilson-Raybould staked her political career on defending a nascent PPSC, created by the Harper government, that is disdained by some top Liberals as a clique of impractical legal purists. They have a point, given the PPSC’s obstinance on the SNC-Lavalin file.
Wilson-Raybould is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation who has spent most of her career as an Indigenous-affairs advocate. A misfit in the Trudeau government, she neither expected nor wanted to be embraced by the political life or the Liberal party. “Not my world,” she writes.
In recounting a 2019 meeting with Trudeau in her memoir, Wilson-Raybould suggests the PM wanted her to help cover up the pressure he and his PMO had put on her over SNC-Lavalin.
“I knew he wanted me to lie,” she writes, “to attest that what had occurred had not occurred.” In fact, Wilson-Raybould knew no such thing. She surmised it.
With words chosen carefully to protect herself from libel suits, Wilson-Raybould implies in her memoir that Trudeau is economical with the truth, is habitually manipulative (at least he was with her), and is influenced by political and business elites.
That pretty much describes Franklin Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, Angela Merkel and other leaders who do good, though on occasion their machinations are not pretty to look at.
Wilson-Raybould has little to say about the accomplishments of the Trudeau government in which she served. On Trudeau’s Canada Child Benefit, for instance, which has lifted about 300,000 children from poverty.
Wilson-Raybould did, however, trouble to disseminate a lengthy list of her own achievements as justice minister on being demoted from that post.
Wilson-Raybould knows she is an important person. She expected Trudeau to fire advisers in his PMO more seasoned than herself who had communicated with her about SNC-Lavalin. She has equated her treatment by the PMO to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a shocking episode in Richard Nixon’s manoeuvres to suborn the U.S. Constitution.
Trudeau’s reminder to Wilson-Raybould that “there are differences between pressure and direction” went over her head. (Pressure is guidance; direction is an order.) Wilson-Raybould still doesn’t grasp that she was insubordinate and was getting away with it.
The story comes to a grotty end, with backbencher Wilson-Raybould refusing to give up her swank ministerial suite to the new Minister of Northern Affairs, Dan Vandal, a Métis MP from Winnipeg.
Wilson-Raybould is an interesting example of bringing narcissism and absolutism together in the lab.
Everybody stand back.