This is the resistance
IN VANCOUVER GRANVILLE, JODY WILSON-RAYBOULD LOOKS TO TAKE ON THE LIBERAL MACHINE
Michael Aiello steps into the campaign office of Jody Wilson-Raybould and delivers a kind of impromptu political monologue.
“Unfortunately, we rely on party insiders to do the right thing, and I’m really disturbed by that,” he says.
Aiello cannot cast a ballot for Wilson-Raybould because he resides in the nearby riding of Vancouver Kingsway, but he’s come here to pledge his support for her campaign and has signed up to volunteer wherever he’s needed on election night.
Aiello, like many others who have come out to support the former attorney general, is motivated by her high-profile battle with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, in which he and his office pressured Wilson-Raybould for months in a bid to help SNCLavalin avoid criminal charges of fraud and corruption.
In an explosive report this summer, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion found that Trudeau had used his power to “circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit” his own public prosecutor through those efforts, and had in turn violated conflict-of-interest laws.
“All those members of the cabinet and of the party, and nobody has asked for him to step down, they put him and his interests above the country,” Aiello says.
His comments point to a belief that has drawn a number of volunteers to this campaign — many of whom might not have otherwise found common cause. Another volunteer, Joanne Namsoo, rides the bus from a different riding three times a week to work the front desk.
“We’re getting people volunteering for our campaign from right across the socalled political spectrum,” Wilson-Raybould says.
Her re-election bid in Vancouver Granville, now as an Independent candidate, has the feel of a resistance effort. It also conveys an underdog mentality: the new Granville riding is split between what has long been a Liberal stronghold, where she faces off against the party’s smooth-talking candidate Taleeb Noormohamed, a former tech executive.
The Conservatives are running former party staffer Zach Segal while the NDP has put forward Yvonne Hanson, an environmental advocate with ties to fringe group Extinction Rebellion.
Wilson-Raybould won Granville handily in 2015, one of a few star candidates recruited by the Trudeau Liberals. She was named Canada’s first Indigenous minister of justice.
Her independent campaign, bereft of the powers of the emotionless, vote-getting machine that is the Liberal party, has a distinctly Jody-centric atmosphere. The walls of her campaign office are adorned with picture frames displaying the former attorney general alongside First Nations representatives and fellow Independent candidate Jane Philpott.
In an interview, she is more preoccupied with the issues that she says are most important to residents in the Granville riding, like the environment, housing affordability and First Nations reconciliation. She claims to hold no personal vendettas.
“I try not to take anything personally,” she says. “But don’t get me wrong, there has been an extraordinary amount of campaigns that attempt to smear me and what I’ve done, and people have not been very kind.”
Noormohamed, for his part, says the SNC-Lavalin scandal simply isn’t on the radar when he goes canvassing in the riding.
“SNC is interesting to the media,” he says. “In this riding, people have real issues.”
Noormohamed, a community organizer who has worked in high-level roles for several tech firms, says he doesn’t view his campaign as an explicit race against Wilson-Raybould. He describes the increasingly outlandish cost of housing in the area, which was among the foremost reasons he decided to run for the Liberals. A vote for him would ensure voters will have a seat at the table in Ottawa, he says.
“I think that’s ultimately the choice voters will be making: do they think that they’re going to have a member of Parliament that’s going to be sitting in government and making things actually happen, or is there some other path that they would like to take.”
Residents living among the rows of new condo buildings that line the northern edge of the riding, overlooking downtown Vancouver’s glass towers, have mixed feelings about the various candidates. Many are unaware or unconcerned about Wilson-Raybould and the SNC-Lavalin affair.
“I think that what she did was good, but it won’t make me vote for her necessarily,” says Nicole Knoetze, a 26-year-old computer sciences student.
Like other residents in the riding, the rising cost of living is top of mind, along with environmental concerns. More than half of her income goes toward rent.
Knoetze, typically a Liberal voter, said she has questioned voting for the party in the wake of SNC-Lavalin, but prefers its moderate position.
“I think it’s opened my eyes to other parties, but no other parties have really convinced me.”
The SNC-Lavalin scandal emerged after a report by the Globe and Mail alleged that Trudeau, through several high-level officials in the Prime Minister’s Office and Finance ministry, had pressured the justice minister to overturn a decision from the director of public prosecutions that blocked the company from avoiding criminal trial.
SNC-Lavalin had for years been lobbying for a so-called “deferred prosecution agreement,” or DPA, which would have allowed the firm to sidestep criminal charges alleging it bribed the Gadhafi government between 2001 and 2011 in order to secure contracts in Libya.
The report by the ethics commissioner placed the blame firmly on Trudeau.
“As prime minister, Mr. Trudeau was the only public office holder who, by virtue of his position, could clearly exert influence over Ms. Wilson-Raybould,”
Wilson-Raybould, for her part, says her primary focus is to get re-elected so she can continue to address voter concerns.
Lately she has been speaking publicly on reconciliation; last month she released her book, From Where I Stand: Rebuilding Indigenous Nations for a Stronger Canada, a collection of speeches and other writings on the topic.
Some critics have said her efforts in that area have gone too far, as with a directive she issued late in her term as justice minister that called upon government lawyers to negotiate rather than litigate in disputes with First Nations.
While the intent of the directive was viewed as positive, some within the justice ministry claimed it was a recipe for Ottawa to simply “litigate badly,” according to an internal memo first reported by the National Post in April.
Others have said that Bill C-46, the impaired-driving law sponsored by Wilson-Raybould, was constitutionally unsound by allowing police officers to enforce breathalyzer tests without needing reasonable cause. The law has already been constitutionally challenged several times in court.
Nearly a year after the initial story broke on SNCLavalin, Wilson-Raybould appears not to feel bitterness about the affair.
“For me, personally, it was about nine months of a very unpleasant reality,” she says. “But when I look back and try to find lessons there, more people are having conversations about the rule of law, what it means, what it means to have independence of our institutions.”
While SNC-Lavalin is rarely mentioned by voters at their doorsteps, she says, the issue more generally has “fostered this environment of discussing how we can actually do better to make our politics more representative.”
Her campaign recently put out a poll that suggests she would secure 37 per cent of the vote, compared with 27 per cent for Noormohamed, though it sampled just 440 people. But she is aware that many voters will simply vote along party lines rather than cast an independent vote.
As newly minted volunteer Aiello leaves Wilson-Raybould’s campaign office, he expresses dissatisfaction at living in a separate riding where he can’t vote for her. “I wish,” he says.
“We wish you could, too,” she says, before he walks out into the street.
WHAT SHE DID WAS GOOD, BUT IT WON’T MAKE ME VOTE FOR HER NECESSARILY.