Liberals "Investigating" The Liberal Government

"This is not an investigation, that is simply going through the motions. Liberals seem to think that this should be just a sort of study group, a book club to look at all sorts of interesting ideas about the law rather than the scandal that's right in front of Canadians."
"At the end of the day, this is really not that complicated. This is about the fact that certain officials in the PMO [prime minister's office] were alleged to have put pressure on the former attorney general to interfere in a criminal investigation, nothing more, nothing less."
"The Liberals aren't interested in that. They're interested in covering this up."
New Democratic Member of Parliament Nathan Cullen

"Everyone within the Indigenous community, rank and file, grassroots, in every single community, Facebook, social media, everyone is talking about how upset and angry they are at the prime minister's callous dismissal of such a committed, dedicated and principled person such as Jody Wilson-Raybould."
Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould during a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall, Wednesday Nov. 4, 2015 in Ottawa. (CP/Adrian Wyld)

The House of Commons Justice committee committed to looking into allegations of political interference with law and justice on the part of the prime minister's office and perhaps the prime minister as well. Because this is a majority Liberal government, the Liberal members of the committee are in the majority, with five Liberals to override the objections of the Conservative and the NDP members of the committee. The hearing investigating the issue of alleged wrong-doing on the part of the prime minister and/or his closest advisers has now refused to hear from any of the involved principals.

Choosing instead a more obviously anodyne investigation to protect and exculpate the governing Liberals, inviting only the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Deputy Justice Minister and the current Minister of Justice who was appointed when Jody Wilson-Raybould was taken off the file and given a backhanded penalty as Minister of Veterans Affairs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refuses to allow his previous Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould to speak to the issue of claims his government attempted to suborn justice.

SNC Lavalin spent years lobbying to change sentencing rules to escape heavy penalties in a fraud and bribery case. (The Canadian Press)

Governments in the Province of Quebec are notorious for corruption and bribes with officials in the construction industry with whom contracts are signed to undertake vital infrastructure projects. Scandals pop up here and there, now and again, pointing out just how taxed the province is to distinguish between normal business practise and engaging in unlawful criminal acts. What is typical and 'normal' -- albeit illegal and unethical -- for Quebec is not generally reflected to the same degree outside the province in greater Canada.

Certainly, Quebec-based SNC-Lavalin, built into one of the world's largest engineering-construction firms, with global employees of around 50,000 would qualify as a case in point. A company now charged under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, for its $160-million in kickbacks and bribes offered for contracts to the former Moammar Gadhafi regime in Libya. This certainly wasn't a one-off by any means; for SNC-Lavalin this was business-as-usual.

An associate with SNC-Lavalin, Riadh Ben Aissa was convicted after pleading guilty to forging documents and came away with a 51=month prison sentence after he secured hundreds of millions in kickbacks for contracts with the Gadhafi regime. The former chief executive officer, Pierre Duhaime pleaded guilty to breach-of-trust charges in the bribery scandal connected with construction of the $1.3-billion McGill University hospital related to $50-million paid out in bribes for the hospital contract.

Michel Fournier, former president of the Federal Bridge Corp. pleaded guilty last year to taking $2.3 million in bribes from SNC-Lavalin which then won a $127-million contract to upgrade the bridge. The RCMP has just now laid charges. Last November Normand Morin, former SNC-Lavalin vice-president pleaded guilty to reduced charges in a fraud to circumvent federal election financing laws in a scheme where employees were invited to make donations, submit fake invoices and the company reimbursed them; $100,000-worth of donations to the Liberals.

Oh, and just by the way, the World Bank instituted a ten-year contract ban on the Montreal construction firm in connection with bribes that took place in Bangladesh in 2013. Ah, and incidentally, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2012 found Canada to rank as the worst of the G7 countries in bribery while last September, Transparency International found Canada to have closed in on the "back of the pack" in foreign bribery enforcement.

Despite all this -- because of this corrupt history -- SNC under its new management, strenuously lobbied the Liberal government to bring in an amendment to the Criminal Code. And the Liberal government did just that, following on no fewer than 80 intervention lobbying meetings between officials of SNC-Lavalin and the federal government, including the prime minister's office. In September of 2018 the new remediation agreement amendment came into effect, and SNC-Lavalin breathed a sigh of relief.

They anticipated that they would be seen to qualify for a remediation agreement whereby they would pay a fine, promise to behave in future, and go on with their business, instead of facing a scheduled criminal trial where, if convicted as they would be on the clear evidence, they would fail to qualify to bid on government contracts for a decade. This amendment was brought in on a complex omnibus bill, piggy-backing on a huge budget bill and no one in Parliament was aware they were responsible for bringing in a Criminal Code amendment that never saw debate in Parliament.

But, oh dear, The Minister of Justice's director of the Public Prosecution Service felt secure in evaluating the situation through the lens of the law, denying the company's expectation; they would go to trial. To begin with, under conditions stipulated in the new amendment a company would have had to bring to the attention of authorities on their own the existence of illegal activities to qualify, and SNC-Lavalin certainly did no such thing; in fact, denied they had done anything wrong when the RCMP began their investigation.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or his trusted servants in the prime minister's office put pressure on then-Attorney-General Jody Wilson-Raybould to override the decision of her director of the PPS. It may be that the prime minister exerted pressure on the Attorney-General in the matter of implementing the provisions of the UN-sponsored Rights of Indigenous Peoples to announce that it would be unworkable as "law" in Canada despite Canada having signed on to it. This was a bitter pill for an Indigenous woman of the law given the status of Minister of Justice to have to state.

Still from video of former Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould resigning from the Liberal Cabinet

Her resulting alienation from her aboriginal community after speaking at the AFN's general assembly in June of 2016, no doubt affected her familial and activist relations with her father, a renowned chief and committed Indigenous-rights activist. "Respectfully, it is a political distraction to undertaking the hard work required to actually implement it", she solemnly informed the gathered Indian chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations, who would most certainly have been stunned that one of their own delivered that unexpected message.

Quite possibly, being guided toward how she should respond in the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin, a giant engineering-construction employee of thousands of Canadian workers, the bulk of them in Montreal, abutting Justin Trudeau's electoral riding, rankled her sense of justice on top of the still-painful memories of her previous declaration. Jody Wilson-Raybould would not be used again, to surrender to a demand on her position to fail to uphold the law when the prime minister would prefer she see the matter his way.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press