That’s how you defend the rule of law
Where to begin? Well, it sounded and felt like a death knell for the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.
As Jody Wilson-Raybould, the deposed federal justice minister and attorney-general, read aloud her opening statement at the justice committee Wednesday, with breathtaking clarity and intelligence, the room (and likely living rooms across the country) was still.
Her revelations were so shocking that it left the government of “sunny ways” under a black cloud and Canada looking like a corrupt Third World banana republic. The stink so envelops the Prime Minister himself, many of his staffers, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his chief of staff, and the Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, that if they had a shred of integrity, which is very much in doubt, some if not all of them would resign.
(Here, a heartfelt mea culpa. I so badly misread Wernick, Canada’s top public servant, when he testified earlier this month. It is now clear, to me at least, that he entirely misrepresented his conversations with Wilson-Raybould.)
For four months last fall, Wilson-Raybould was subjected to a profane lobbying effort by the PMO, the Clerk and various officials to have her interfere with the decision made Sept. 4 by her Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Kathleen Roussel, not to offer SNC-Lavalin a way out of criminal prosecution for bribery and fraud in connection with its activities years earlier in Libya.
The way out is a deferred prosecution agreement, a DPA — new to Canada — and SNC-Lavalin would be the first in the country to get it. When Wilson-Raybould got that notice from Roussel, she did her due diligence. While she was doing that, two days later, Morneau’s chief of staff, Ben Chin, approached her chief of staff, Jessica Prince. Chin told Prince “if they don’t get a DPA, they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election (the election was Oct. 1 of last year) right now, so we can’t have that happen.” That was just the beginning.
Until Wilson-Raybould was shuffled out of the AG portfolio in January, this government did all it could to get her to change her mind.
They worked her deputy, Nathalie Drouin (worked around Wilson-Raybould as it were), believing her more pliable.
They fiercely lobbied Prince, with no success, to also lean on the AG.
Even as the preliminary hearing into the charges against SNC was underway and later, in October, even when SNC had filed a motion in Federal Court seeking to overturn the Roussel/Wilson-Raybould decision, the pressure continued.
In other words, even as the matter was actively before the courts, when it was clearly wrong for politicians to interfere, they did. By mid-September last year, Wilson-Raybould had done her due diligence and concluded her DPP, Roussel, was correct and that she would not interfere with the decision: SNC would not get a DPA. From that moment on, she told all those who were leaning on her to back off.
She told Morneau, when they met in the House on Sept. 19, that he had to call off his dogs (Chin) because the contacts were inappropriate.
She told Trudeau and Wernick in their Sept. 17 meeting.
Wernick mentioned that SNC had a board meeting in three days. The company would likely be moving to London “if this happens” (the no-DPA) and reminded her there was “an election in Quebec soon.” At that point, Trudeau jumped in, stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “I am an MP in Quebec — the member for Papineau.” Wilson-Raybould looked him in the eye and asked (not, as he has said, whether he was directing her), “Are you politically interfering with my role, my decision, as the AG?
“I would strongly advise against it.”
Trudeau said, “No, no, no — we just need to find a solution.”
After a brief pause in the pressure tactics, that would soon become the code: The PM needed to find a solution. How about getting an external legal opinion? A PMO senior adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, asked the AG’s chief of staff: “Could she not get an external legal opinion on whether the DPP had exercised their discretion properly” and “then the AG could intervene and seek a stay of proceedings…?” Prince replied that this would be perceived as interference. Bouchard said, if, six months from the federal election, SNC announces it is moving their HQ from Canada, that is bad. “We can have the best policy in the world, but we need to be re-elected.”
On Dec. 5, Wilson-Raybould met with Gerry Butts, then the PM’s principal secretary. He told her they needed a solution. She said no, and referenced the two cases before the courts.
After a lull, Butts and Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford called an urgent meeting with Prince for Dec. 18. Here, Wilson-Raybould read part of a text between her and Prince right after that meeting.
Prince told them it would be interference for the AG to intervene.
And Butts replied “Jess, there is no solution here that doesn’t involve some interference.”
Butts and Telford thought hiring a former Supreme Court judge would be a good idea: It would give “cover,” Telford said, and if Wilson-Raybould was nervous, “we would of course line up all kinds of people to write OpEds saying that what she is doing is proper.”
The next day, Wilson-Raybould took a call from Wernick. He told her Trudeau was very firm. “I think he is gonna find a way to get it done (the DPA) one way or another.
“So, he is in that kinda mood….”
She told him they were “treading on dangerous ground” and issued a stern warning about prosecutorial independence.
He said he was worried, and warned her “how it is not good for the Prime Minister and his Attorney General to be at loggerheads.” She stuck to her guns. On Jan. 7, Trudeau called to tell her she was being moved to Veterans Affairs. On Jan. 11, before the actual shuffle, Deputy Attorney General Nathalie Drouin got a call from Wernick telling her she’d soon have a new boss and that one of his first orders of business was to talk SNC-Lavalin with the PM.
The rule of law, and prosecutorial independence, was no longer being protected by the ferocious, principled Wilson-Raybould.
THE CONVERSATIONS THAT I HAD, WHERE THEY BECAME VERY CLEARLY INAPPROPRIATE, WAS WHEN POLITICAL ISSUES CAME UP, LIKE THE ELECTION IN QUEBEC, LIKE LOSING THE ELECTION IF SNC WERE TO MOVE THEIR HEADQUARTERS. — JODY WILSON-RAYBOULD ON JAN. 7, TRUDEAU CALLED TO TELL HER SHE WAS BEING MOVED TO VETERANS AFFAIRS.