LavScam, Continued Coverage

We now have it from the Clerk of the Privy Council, the highest public servant in the land, that Canada's former Attorney General, Jodie Wilson-Raybould was, indeed "pressured,"  though without avail, to abort the prosecution of Québec-based engineering giant, SNC Lavalin, for bribery and corruption. As Andrew Coyne notes in the National Post, this fact raises some interesting questions as to what was supposed to happen next, had the soon to be demoted Attorney General caved to the pressure:

... As we have been discovering in recent days, in fact all sorts of pressure was applied to the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould — by the prime minister, by his officials, by the clerk — to politicize the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. They just didn’t call it that, at least until now. Leave aside the legal and ethical considerations. I’m just interested in how they thought this would work. Suppose she had bowed to the “appropriate pressure” of the prime minister and his people and ordered the director of public prosecutions to drop all charges against SNC-Lavalin and negotiate a remediation agreement in their place. What would she, and they, have done when the DPP informed her this was not lawful, as the company had not met the conditions the law requires for her to enter such negotiations, having neither voluntarily disclosed its alleged wrongdoing, nor admitted corporate responsibility for it, nor made reparations to the people it had allegedly defrauded? Or when the DPP pointed out that the professed reason for SNC-Lavalin to be granted such leniency, the jobs that would allegedly be lost in Quebec, is expressly precluded by the same law? Or when she resigned rather than carry out an order she considered unlawful? Did they not think this would cause something of, I don’t know, a stir? Did anyone think this through? Suppose the DPP had not resigned, accepting instead this unprecedented assault on her prosecutorial independence, not to say her professional judgement. How was she supposed to negotiate a remediation agreement, if the endpoint – that SNC-Lavalin was to be let off on all charges — had already been decided? What bargaining leverage would she have? And how would anyone in government have explained all this when, as the attorney general is legally obliged to do whenever she gives instructions to the DPP regarding the “initiation or conduct” of a prosecution (assuming this even applies to the present situation), she made the order public? What reasons was she supposed to give? “I am overturning the prosecutor’s decision to proceed with charges of fraud and corruption against SNC-Lavalin because it will cost jobs in a province where we need to win seats, in an election year?” Did they not think this would cause something of, I don’t know, a stir? Did anyone think this through? Or never mind the public, or the prosecutor: how did they think they were going to explain it to a judge, whose consent is also legally required for any remediation agreement? But then it hit me. The answer, surely, is for the attorney general to talk to the judge. Or maybe the prime minister should, or one of his people. Not to direct him, of course: that would be wrong. But just to explain the context, if you will. The policy objective, after all, is to spare SNC-Lavalin from being convicted of a crime, owing to the serious disruption to its business model that would result if, merely because it had a history of bribing people to win public contracts, it were to be prevented from bidding on public contracts. Does it really matter, in pursuit of that overriding objective, whose independence has to take a hit: prosecutorial or judicial? I realize this suggestion will shock some people. Probably the same people were shocked when the allegation first surfaced that the prime minister’s people had tried to get the attorney general to interfere in the prosecution of a company that had given hundreds of thousands of dollars, legally and illegally, to the Liberal Party. But over time, the mind adjusts. Subtler voices came to the fore, explaining why the pressure the prime minister’s officials were at that time still denying was in fact entirely proper, an elegant and sophisticated solution to a difficult problem. ...

Under the Westminster model of government, civil servants, are generally assumed to be non-partisan, working with whichever party happens to be elected government to fulfill the government's program. As David Akin of GlobalNews reports, however, the present head of the Public Service of Canada, David Wernick appeared, during his testimony before the House Justice Committee, to be distinctly biased in a pro-government way and even somewhat wacky in his comments about the pressures that were brought to bear on former Canadian Attorney General Jodie Wilson-Raybould with the aim of causing her to abort the SNC Lavalin prosecution for bribery and corruption.

“I’ve worked very, very closely, for three years, on almost a daily basis with the current government, the current cabinet and the current Prime Minister’s Office,” Wernick said. “In my observation, in my experience, they have always, always conducted themselves to the highest standards of integrity.” Whoa, sunshine, back up just a bit there. Justin Trudeau is the first and only prime minister in our history to have been found to have broken a federal law while in office and that law was an ethics law. How’s that for “highest standards of integrity”? Moreover, the current ethics investigation into this whole Wilson-Raybould matter is the fifth ethics investigation of a Trudeau cabinet member since 2015. Now this fifth investigation may come to nothing, but, so far, the office of the ethics commissioner is four-for-four in finding ethics violations.

Related:

Toronto Sun: MARIN: SNC-Lavalin affair goes to the core of our democracy

Macleans: Welcome to Canada’s House of Cards

Meantime: CBC: Mark Norman's defence team targets Trudeau, Butts with subpoenas