Is that blood on the floor of the PMO?
My prior expectations for Wednesday’s House of Commons justice committee drama, starring ousted justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, were low. Much of the matter for discussion that has filled the newspapers and airwaves since the controversy came to public notice has, I think, consisted of red herrings. Questions of Wilson-Raybould being bound by solicitor-client privilege have always seemed to me to be a little beside the point, and the experts seem to have gradually arrived at this view as a consensus.
The degree to which she was bound by cabinet confidence is perhaps another matter. Her belated resignation from Trudeau’s cabinet doesn’t let her off the hook, given the oath she took to preserve that confidence, and at least some experts take a view of “cabinet confidence” as including discussions between Wilson-Raybould’s flunkies and the prime minister’s flunkies, discussions in which no minister at all participated. It was not clear to me, anyway, that Wilson-Raybould would have anything besides colour to add to the basic sequence of known events. She received copious amounts of “advice” or “pressure,” depending on what word you find convenient, concerning the alleged effects of refusing to make a deferred-prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin over criminal corruption and fraud charges. She concluded that the decision of the Public Prosecution Service, ultimately answerable to her as then-attorney general of Canada, need not be interfered with. Everybody agrees that under the prevailing “Shawcross doctrine,” this decision belonged only to her, and the prime minister had no place in making it and no right to apply pressure concerning it. Raybould-Wilson, in plain sight, soon got shuffled to Veterans Affairs. This ill-explained and definitely unusual move was a self-evident surprise to the general public and the establishment, and was equally so, seemingly, to Wilson-Raybould herself. When the prime minister started to get questions about her demotion, he said “Her (continued) presence in cabinet should actually speak for itself.” She resigned from cabinet a few hours later. What could she say to the justice committee that would make all of this look less suspicious, or for that matter more so?
Well. Now we know. (The answer is “more so.”) Wilson-Raybould’s testimony has added colour to the detail already outlined before the committee by Michael Wernick, the clerk of the Privy Council. And that colour bears a strong resemblance to the blood of several Prime Minister’s Office staffers, plus arguably Wernick and others. Wilson-Raybould’s account describes “concerted and sustained” politically motivated interference with the SNC prosecution. The prime minister’s delegates kept mentioning the upcoming election in Quebec to Wilson-Raybould and her staff, and the prime minister raised Wilson-Raybould’s hackles in a Sept. 17 face-toface meeting by pointing out “I am an MP in Quebec, the MP for Papineau” in the context of a discussion of SNC. Any hint of electoral incentives introduced into such a discussion already runs afoul of Shawcross. But anyone might suffer a slip of the tongue! What Wilson-Raybould’s testimony drives home is that she reached the conclusion that she should not intervene with the prosecution service quite early; that she emphasized to the PM and his office that her decision was final and firm; that she explicitly discouraged further discussions about revising the decision; and that the discussions stubbornly kept happening anyway, over her forceful protests. There was a pause in the PMO pressure after a Sept. 20 SNC board meeting blew over, but a month later the PM’s Quebec adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, was griping to her: “We can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected.” The PMO started to pelt her with suggestions that some “independent” legal personage, perhaps a retired Supreme Court justice, could be brought in to give her convenient, fresh advice about overturning the prosecution service’s decision. (This was apparently described in explicit terms as “giving cover.”) The importuning from the PMO grew so intense, Wilson-Raybould says, that in December she started to think that a replay of Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” (a firing of the U.S. attorney general) might be in the offing. In late December, Wernick kept mentioning that the prime minister’s “mood” was not good (“He is going to find a way to get it done, one way or the other”), and that this was a result of her refusal to kill the SNC prosecution. He warned Wilson-Raybould that she had put herself in the position of being “at loggerheads” with Trudeau. When Wilson-Raybould did in fact get massacred, Wernick is said to have told her deputy minister that Wilson-Raybould’s replacement would be called upon to discuss SNC with the prime minister very early and that she should prepare him for the chat.
This was all accompanied by too many astonishing grace notes to count. In writing this article I had already almost forgotten Wilson-Raybould’s mention of the departed Gerald Butts complaining (Dec. 5) that he “didn’t like” the independent prosecution legislation created by the Conservatives and Stephen Harper. News consumers should also note alleged references by PMO staff to the possibility of planting op-eds (“We would line up all kinds of people”) in friendly newspapers to support a decision to let SNC off the hook. Wilson-Raybould’s testimony is surely the most extraordinary and compelling given in a Commons committee setting in a long time. It does not create a pretty picture of business as usual in our country. It will take a while to digest.