BLATCHFORD ON OTTAWA’S RELATIONSHIP WITH SNC.
As an old criminal court reporter, I have watched dozens and dozens of cross-examinations, and rarely have they not been what the great American jurist John Henry Wigmore said they were: “The greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”
The deposed attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was hardly exposed to a court-style cross this week, but make no mistake: She’s come a hell of a lot closer to it than any of the other sorry players in the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio. She emerged whole, and her evidence had the wonderful and unmistakable ring of truth.
At the justice committee Wednesday, she was cogent and detailed, with names and dates and some contemporaneously made notes and/or emails and texts to help her already-clear memory. She was thoughtful and responsive to the questions.
Then look at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau, Liberal house leader Bardish Chagger and all the other Liberal MPs who nod like those bobbleheads you see in the back windows of cars — and with approximately the same intelligence.
Since this scandal broke, the PM has been completely unresponsive to Opposition questions in question period (when he has deigned to appear), reciting instead the pap he has force-fed Chagger et al. about “always standing up for jobs” while simultaneously “respecting Canadian institutions.”
Even Morneau was reduced to saying this Thursday, before he bolted from a group of reporters. Among them, the Liberals have said this probably 100 times and I still don’t understand how the Speaker lets them get away with it or what it means — except that what they mean are SNC-Lavalin jobs.
One of the tiny, telling details from Wilson-Raybould’s evidence was how, when making the case for a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) for SNC-Lavalin, Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick brought up the fact that the company had “a board meeting on Thursday with stockholders.”
(This was at a meeting Wilson-Raybould had Sept. 17, 2018, with Wernick and Trudeau, at a point when Director of Public Prosecutions Kathleen Roussel had already decided not to offer a DPA, and Wilson-Raybould had decided it was not appropriate for her to intervene.)
Even if one accepts that it was A-OK for Trudeau and his minions to badger Wilson-Raybould into changing her mind — and she didn’t, and told the pair of them they were out of line, as indeed they were — why on Earth was Wernick so acutely aware of SNC’s business timelines? He did it again two days later, at a second meeting Trudeau insisted Wilson-Raybould have with Wernick, mentioning again the upcoming SNC meeting, telling her that its lawyer, Frank Iacobucci (a former Supreme Court judge), was “no shrinking violet” and that he, Wernick, understood SNC was “going back and forth with” Roussel.
Why all this effort on behalf of SNC?
Well, the benign explanation is that DPAs are meant to spare innocent parties — workers, shareholders, pensioners — from paying the price for the corporate malfeasance of a few. Like plea bargains for individuals, DPAs are pragmatic tools for prosecutors.
And SNC-Lavalin, under its current CEO Neil Bruce and previous CEO Robert Card, has made much of how they have changed the corporate culture at the company, brought in a big broom and fired anyone remotely associated with bad behaviour and developed a whole ethical regime. This is all to the good, if so.
But consider the company’s very checkered past, not all of it so long ago.
In 2016, on the heels of the Charbonneau inquiry into the construction industry in Quebec, SNCLavalin entered into a “voluntary reimbursement program” with the Quebec government. According to Justice Quebec, this was a two-year program “to ensure mainly the recovery of amounts improperly paid as a result of fraud or fraudulent tactics in connection with public contracts.” After paying back the monies owed, “participants could obtain a discharge that protected them from civil proceedings for fraud or fraudulent tactics” in connection with getting a public contract.
In October 2015, SNC-Lavalin reached a settlement with the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) “regarding allegations of sanctionable practices” by a subsidiary of the company in connection with two AfDB-financed projects, one in Uganda, the other in Mozambique. According to the AfDB news release, the agreement “resolves allegations uncontested by the company of illicit payments ordered by former SNC International Inc. employees to public officials in order to secure contracts.”
Under the terms of the agreement, AfDB imposed “a conditional non-debarment (debarring prevents a company getting public contracts) … for a period of two years and 10 months” and repayment of $1.5 million.
The projects dated to October 2008 and December 2010.
More recently, in September 2016, SNC-Lavalin entered into a “compliance agreement” with the Commissioner of Elections Canada for illegal contributions made to federal political entities between March 9, 2004 and May 1, 2011. According to the agreement on the Commissioner’s website, SNCLavalin Group Inc. reimbursed $117,803.49 for illegal contributions, almost all of which had gone to the Liberal Party of Canada, various Liberal riding associations and contestants in the Liberal Party’s 2006 leadership race. The rest, $8,200, was tossed the way of the Conservative Party. (The company was reimbursing employees for contributions it had wanted them to make.) And, of course, there’s the World Bank debarment of SNC-Lavalin, and 100 affiliates, for a period of 10 years.
That happened in April 2013, and, according to the World Bank news release, it was related to the company’s “misconduct in relation to the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project in Bangladesh,” as well as unspecified misconduct in relation to another World Bank-financed Rural Electrification and Transmission project in Cambodia.
None of that much mattered when it came to giving SNC-Lavalin a pass. In December 2015, less than two months after the Liberals came to power, SNC signed an “administrative agreement” with the federal government, allowing it to bid and win work despite the criminal charges still pending.
These fraud and bribery charges date back to 2000-2011, for its alleged $48-million worth of bribery in Libya, which are now in different ways before two Canadian courts. As of Thursday, according to the Public Services and Procurement website, SNC-Lavalin is the only supplier in the country with such an agreement.
Just how stupid do the Liberals think Canadians are?